Part 4: Dark Alliance,,,They were Doing their Patriotic Duty...Something Happened to Ivan

 Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb 

 6

"They were doing their patriotic duty" 

Unlike Carlos Cabezas, who walked into an existing cocaine sales operation and began dealing dope the next day, Danilo Blandón was forced to make his own way, finding his own buyers in a city he really didn't know. If he had been in San Francisco, it would have been a different story. Menses's drug network there was well established and, according to Blandón, flourishing. After distributing 900 kilos—nearly one ton—in 1981, Blandón said, Menses's business in San Francisco "got bigger and bigger, because all the family was working at that time with him, in the drug business." 

By contrast, Menses's network in Los Angeles was of more recent origin and had been dealt a serious blow in late 1981 with the arrest and subsequent flight of his West Covina dealer, Julio Bermúdez, who had been moving about twenty kilos a month before he was arrested. 

While Blandón struggled to establish a customer base, he made himself useful to the Menses organization in other ways. He became "like a secretary for Mr. Menses, because he already saw that I could do a lot for him. He started telling me, 'Go out and collect some money to somebody else in L.A.' and I started doing it, and he started getting trust, trusting in me." 

Blandón said he would not only pick up money from customers in L.A. but deliver it as well, taking cash from Menses to pay his cocaine suppliers in Los Angeles, men Blandón described as Colombians. He also began keeping the books for the L.A. drug operation, describing himself as Menses's "administrator." 

"I wasn't working with him in San Francisco. He was working alone," Blandón said. "I keeping the books from L.A." 

"You were keeping his books in L.A.?" Blandón was asked. 

"Yes." 

"So he was up in San Francisco, and you're down here in L.A.?" 

"Yes." 

"So you were running his Los Angeles operation, isn't that correct?" 

"Yes," Blandón said.

"But remember, we were running just a—whatever we were running in L.A. goes—the profit is—was going to the Contra revolution. I don't know from San Francisco." 

The relationship between Blandón and Menses quickly transcended the cocaine business. Meneses opened up a restaurant on Hoover Street in East Los Angeles, which Blandón helped oversee, called the Chicalina. Blandón described the establishment somewhat curiously to a federal grand jury, calling it a "marketing" operation. "That was not my restaurant. That was Menses's restaurant," he said, but he admitted that he'd told others he was one of the owners. 

Another of Blandón's jobs involved looking after the welfare of Menses's wife and children. Menses had sent them from San Francisco to L.A. after he started yet another affair. In 1982, Blandón said, Menses "was in love" with a woman in South San Francisco named Blanca Margarita Castano, a Nicaraguan who would later become his fifth wife. 

Blanca was a cousin of a top Sandinista official, Bayardo Arce Castano, one of the Nicaraguan government's nine commandantes and one of the most hard-line radicals among them. Blanca's apartment near the Cow Palace, an old auditorium made famous by Jefferson Airplane, was used to store cocaine. "I went one time to pick it up right there," Blandón said. 

A frequent houseguest of Menses during this period was John Lacome, a San Franciscan who was friendly with Norwin's nephews, Jaime and Jairo. Lacome said he lived at Menses's home for long periods during the early 1980s, and told of cocaine-fueled parties that went on for days. Menses appeared totally unafraid of being arrested; "There was a woman he was selling to, and this woman would drive by his house, honk, and he'd come walking out to the street with two kilos in his hands, in broad daylight, and give them to her," Lacome said. 

Menses was fond of expensive leisure suits, wore a fairly obvious toupee, and took pains to surround himself with women, as did his nephews. A former girlfriend of Jaime Menses, Gloria Lopez, said the nephews all drove flashy new cars, which they would trade in as soon as they tired of them. That was how she first noticed Jaime, she said. She was tending bar in the Mission District, and he would drive up in a different new car every couple weeks. 

Lopez, who later had a child with Jaime Menses, said Jaime started off driving trucks for his uncle Norwin right out of high school. Initially the loads were military uniforms; then he graduated to moving a more lucrative product—and started earning a substantially bigger paycheck. 

"You give a kid like that out of high school all that money, and what do you think is going to happen?" Lopez asked. "I can't say that I blame Jaime for what he did. Then. I blame him for a lot of things that happened later though." 

Jaime's father, Jaime Sr., was also pressed into service for the cause, hauling money to Central America for brother Norwin. "Jaime Sr., I respected him very much," Rafael Cornejo said. "He really wasn't too much involved with drugs. He had a brake factory in Nicaragua before the revolution, called FRICA. He was a very decent man. During, I can't remember which year, he was incarcerated in the U.S., 1984–85. . .. He'd been stopped at the border with $70,000 or something. He was taking the money down to Nicaragua. Once I told him, 'Look, Jaime, let me do that for you.' But he said, no, he could do just fine." Jaime Menses Sr. was murdered in 1990 in the offices of his money-changing business—FRECERSA—in San Jose, Costa Rica. 

Such were the hazards of being a Menses. So it was not surprising that when Maritza Menses and her children arrived in L.A. in 1982, someone would be assigned to watch over them and help them along. Norwin gave Danilo the job. 

In August 1982 Blandón and Maritza Menses set up a business together in Los Angeles, a company they named JDM Artwork Inc. The name was an acronym made up of the first initials of the incorporators' first names: Josefa Maria Pelligatti, a friend of the Menses; Danilo Blandón; and Maritza Menses. 

The company did silk screen printing, and Blandón said it was started by Meneses to provide an income for his relocated family. But there may have been other motives behind Menses's investment in the silk-screening business. The company quickly became part of the Contras' support network in Los Angeles. ARDE commander Eden Pastora said he visited the firm during a trip he made to L.A. in 1982, and it printed up T-shirts with his likeness on them. Former Pastora aide Carol Prado claimed that a Los Angeles printing company connected to Blandón was used to launder money from drug sales for the Contras. 

Another former associate of Blandón, a Puerto Rican man convicted of counterfeiting U.S. currency, believed that the company also dabbled in funny money, printing up fake twenty-dollar bills that provided operating cash for the FDN. The former associate produced Polaroid photographs that showed him at work in an office with FDN banners and slogans on the wall, and a picture of Blandón in the same office, smiling, his arms thrown over the shoulders of other laughing Hispanic men. A blue-and-white FDN flag was clearly visible on the wall. 

The associate's claims of counterfeiting could not be independently corroborated, but according to CIA cables filed in federal court, the CIA had information by 1984 that Norwin Menses was involved in counterfeiting—both American dollars and Costa Rican colones. In a 1986 interview, Menses said he allowed FDN members to use his wife's Los Angeles T-shirt factory as a meeting place. 

As the Contra support organizations in San Francisco and L.A. grew more active, Menses role with the FDN became much more public. Former FDN director Edgar Chamorro told the San Francisco Examiner in 1986 that he and FDN director Frank Arana flew to San Francisco in October 1982 to select local leaders for the FDN support committee there. Menses attended the organizational meeting, standing quietly in the back of the auto body shop where the meeting was held. Menses "appeared like a fund-raiser, an organizer," Chamorro told the paper. The next day, Chamorro said, Menses helped set up a similar meeting in Los Angeles, providing refreshments beforehand and throwing a party afterward. 

"He was one of the main contacts in L.A.," Chamorro told Examiner reporter Seth Rosenfeld. "He was in charge of the organization of the L.A. meeting, the reception. He drove us to the place. He gave us the schedule for that day. He knew people, he was recommending names" (for leadership positions in the L.A. organization). 

Renato Pena Cabrera, the FDN's San Francisco representative, told federal investigators in 1997 that he was present "on many occasions" when Menses telephoned FDN commander Enrique Bermúdez in Honduras. "Meneses told Pena of Bermúdez's requests for such things as gun silencers (which Meneses obtained in Los Angeles), cross bows, and other military equipment for the Contras." Menses sometimes personally delivered the supplies to the Contras, Pena said; other times he had contacts in Miami and Los Angeles forward them to friendly Honduran authorities. 

"Meneses would bring [back] military information, bulletins, and communiques from Bermúdez that Pena would put into newsletters and give to the press and Contra sympathizers," a summary of Pena's interview states. 

In a recent interview with the CIA, Meneses said that "between 1983 and 1984, his primary role with the California sympathizers was to help recruit personnel for the movement. Meneses says he was asked by Bermúdez to attempt to recruit Nicaraguans in exile and others who were supporters of the Contra movement." The drug lord told the agency's internal investigators that "he was not directed to recruit people with any specific skills, such as pilots or doctors, but was simply told to seek out anyone who wanted to join with the FDN. Meneses states that he was a member of an FDN fund-raising committee, but was not the committee's head." He did not raise much cash but was "involved in 1985 in attempting to obtain material support, medical and general supplies" for the Contras. 

When asked by the author in 1996 where he got the money to pay for these war materials, Meneses gave a slight smile. "There was money available for these purchases," he said. 

Meneses associate Rafael Cornejo said he attended some of the parties Meneses hosted for the FDN at his homes in the San Francisco area. 

"You can say what you want about that man, but his heart and soul was into the movement, and that was his priority more than anything else," said Cornejo, whose father had been a sergeant in Somoza's National Guard. "It's kind of hard to be kicked out of your own country and that's what his passion was. He was straight-up pro-Somocista." 

Blandón complained that Meneses was so tightfisted with the cash he was raising for the Contras that he was making little or no money selling cocaine. "I didn't make any money, you know. It was only for the people in the mountains, you know, for the Contra Revolution," Blandón said. Meneses allowed him to keep enough "just to pay the rent and to pay the food for my daughter. . .just to pay my expenses." Among the Nicaraguan exile community, it was strongly suspected that Meneses was dealing cocaine for the Contras. And it was not un-admired. Somoza's former secretary, Juan C. Wong, one of the first Nicaraguan exiles to begin recruiting ex-Guardia men to join the Contras, said he visited Meneses in San Francisco in 1983. "It's true, it was widely spread around that he was involved with drugs," said Wong, a University of San Francisco grad who knew the Meneses family from before the revolution. "And I don't doubt that they wanted to raise money for the FDN. That's only natural. They were doing their patriotic duty."

Bradley Brunon, Blandón's lawyer, said Blandón was one of several former Somoza supporters dealing cocaine in L.A. in the early 1980s. He met Blandón while defending a middle-class Nicaraguan exile accused of drug trafficking. "People were being arrested who had high government connections, or high military connections, in the Somoza regime, who didn't have any particular lifestyle consistent with being cocaine dealers, didn't have a background consistent with that, but they were highly politicized individuals," Brunon said. "And the only politics I was aware that they were involved with was this attempt to fund the Contra revolutionary insurgency." 

Brunon said it was his understanding that "the Contras, and I don't even know if they were known as that then. . .had no above-the-line funding. Everything was sub rosa and one of the ways they were trying to raise money was importing cocaine. That was information that I didn't specifically receive from Blandón, but that I had surmised based on a series of events that were happening." 

Blandón was fairly close-mouthed about his role with the Contras, according to Brunon. "I don't know the formal particulars of it other than there was this kind of atmosphere of CIA and clandestine activities and so forth that surrounded him when I met him," Brunon said of his longtime client. "He never was specific. I mean, I believed he was involved with the Contras. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Beyond that, I never got into the particulars with him, because I didn't have a need to know at that point." 

An air of mystery also surrounded another associate of Blandón, an odd, cherubic, balding man in his mid-thirties Blandón picked up as a partner shortly after going to work for Meneses. The man would remain at Blandón's side for seven years, though mostly in the shadows. Considering his work history and the activities he was involved with at the time, his appearance in the Nicaraguan's cocaine trafficking entourage is both strange and worrisome. He would give Blandón's drug ring a whole new sideline— weapons and sophisticated electronics equipment—and a whole new smell, the unmistakable aroma of the U.S. intelligence community. 

Brad Brunon met him in 1986, when he showed up unannounced at the lawyer's office and began asking very detailed questions about Blandón's background. "It was just like the hair on the back of your neck goes up. What does this guy want? What's he doing here? Is he investigating Blandón?" Brunon said. "I never knew what his true role was. I mean, he covertly insinuated that he was CIA. At least, if not a sworn member, whatever the hell they do to get to become employees—some sort of operative." Brunon "really didn't have much communication with the guy because he scared me." 

His name was Ronald Jay Lister, a southern California native who began working as a cocaine dealer and money hauler for Blandón in late 1981 or early 1982, just as the CIA was taking over the funding and operations of the newly formed FDN. The CIA has publicly denied any relationship with the man. 

Before launching his life of crime as Danilo Blandón's faithful sidekick, Ronald Lister had been a police officer of one sort or another for nearly fifteen years. He'd started out as a military policeman for the U.S. Army and U.S. Army Reserve, stationed in Orange County with the 414th Military Police company. His service records show he had a degree in political science and was trained in processing prisoners of war captured during the Vietnam conflict. He regularly received excellent fitness reports. While an army reservist, Lister hired on as an officer with the police department of Maywood, a small suburb of Los Angeles that once employed a handful of uniformed patrolmen. He was also a reserve deputy for the L.A. County Sheriff's Office at the same time. 

Lister was called to active duty in the army for a few months in 1969, and later, when his enlistment ended, he volunteered for the U.S. Coast Guard, serving as a reserve port security officer at Terminal Island, in San Pedro, California. In late 1973 he found a home with the Laguna Beach Police Department, which patrols a posh Orange County suburb south of Los Angeles. There, among the rich and famous, he rose through the ranks to become a detective in the burglary division. 

Lieutenant Danielle Adams said Lister was a veteran by the time she arrived in burglary; her recollection of him was that he was "always very successful, very tenacious and got the job done." 

His former chief, Neil Purcell, who was on the hiring board that gave Lister his job, remembers him differently. "You hear lots of things about Ron Lister," Purcell said. "The man, in my opinion, is a lying, conniving, manipulative person who likes to play with people's minds. He's very evasive and loves living on the edge. He's the biggest bullshitter that has ever been placed on this earth." 

Toward the end of Lister's twelve-year stint with the police department, he was traveling in some pretty fast company. "When he worked here, that silly son of a gun was in with—what do they call themselves?—the Royal Highnesses from Iran!" Purcell recalled with a hoot. "Sporting Rolex watches for himself and his wife. Getting wined and dined by these people until finally they [the Iranians] were asked to leave this country. Anything. He threw out names and organizations. He's a very bright guy. As far as intelligence, he's very, very smart." It was the one point upon which Adams and Purcell agreed. 

"Don't ever underestimate him," Adams warned. "He's very, very bright and very tenacious." 

Both Adams and Purcell said Lister became involved in private security work on the side toward the end of 1979. He quit the Laguna Beach police department in May 1980 to pursue that vocation full-time. "He was in the alarm business, is what he originally started off as," Adams recalled. "And he had some muckety-mucks from the Arab countries, so he says, in his alarm business and this was getting pretty elaborate, and that's when he left the police department. I know there was a lot of involvement and a lot of travel while he was still here." 

A few weeks before he resigned, corporate records show, Lister incorporated a company called Pyramid International Security Consultants Inc., based in Newport Beach. What Pyramid was doing between 1980 and 1981 is not known, but Lister stated that this was around the time he first met Blandón, "through a Beverly Hills business connection." He said Blandón introduced him to Norwin Meneses, and that he "provided physical security for both men," who "always paid him in cash." 

Soon after Lister paired up with Blandón and Meneses, his security company began doing business overseas. Blandón told Justice Department interviewers that he and Meneses "entered into an informal partnership [with Lister] for the purpose of selling weapons abroad," specifically in El Salvador. Blandón said the plan was for Lister, Blandón, and Meneses "to get their share of the profits in weapons, which they would then give to the Contras." 

Blandón's attorney, Brad Brunon, described Lister as "one of these guys who would boast about having bugging capabilities, would boast about having wiretap capabilities, you could get any information any time, one of those. . .Ican-uplink-to-the-satellite sort of guy."

Christopher W. Moore, a former reserve Laguna Beach police officer who met Lister in 1979, said Lister hired him as an office manager in 1982 while Moore was working his way through law school. "I think I was actually an officer in Pyramid International. Ron put my name down as treasurer or director or something because he needed to have some directors for the incorporation papers." Moore confirmed that Lister had extensive business dealings in Central America, specifically in El Salvador. Lister explained his travels there to Moore as involving gun running and "helping the Contras, supposedly on behalf of the U.S. government. I remember the longest conversations with him, 'I'm protected. You're working for the government. Don't worry about anything. I'm protected, I'm protected.' I don't know if that was true or not, but I do know that we stopped worrying about domestic security jobs and started concentrating on foreign ones." 

During the early 1980s, when Lister began doing business there, El Salvador was wracked by a vicious civil war and murderous political repression. A tenacious revolutionary guerrilla group, the FMLN, had been running circles around the country's corrupt and inefficient military. The rebels' fight was being assisted by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who have admitted supplying them with tons of Eastern Bloc arms and ammunition. 

The Reagan administration was far more concerned about what was happening in El Salvador than they were about Nicaragua, which Reagan's advisers considered already "lost" to the Communists. One of Reagan's top foreign policy objectives in 1981 and 1982 was to keep what had happened in Nicaragua from spreading to El Salvador, and the administration pushed hard for increased military and economic support for the beleaguered Salvadoran government, particularly after a January 1982 rebel attack on the main military airport in El Salvador demolished dozens of aircraft. 

"Indeed, what came to be known years later as the 'Reagan Doctrine' may have been born in El Salvador in 1982," former Reagan State Department official Robert Kagan wrote in 1996. Halting Sandinista arms shipments to El Salvador was the official reason CIA director William Casey gave to Congress when he informed lawmakers of Reagan's decision in late 1981 to turn the CIA loose in Nicaragua. The Contras were being trained to police the borders to make sure no Sandinista arms got out to the FMLN, Casey claimed. 

Like many of the things the CIA said about the Contras, that explanation was a lie, a smoke screen to hide the agency's true agenda, which was to run a full-scale covert war against the Sandinistas. The Reagan administration found its Salvadoran aid program a tough sell in Congress because of the horrendous human rights abuses then occurring in the country. Frustrated by its inability to crush the FMLN guerrillas in the field despite an overwhelming firepower advantage, elements of the Salvadoran government were striking back at the rebels by murdering thousands of their supporters with death squads—right wing, quasi-military posses that would snatch suspected rebel sympathizers off the streets and leave their mutilated bodies on the outskirts of town a few days later. At the height of this campaign, residents of the capital city of San Salvador would wake up to find forty new bodies every morning. 

The Salvadoran government officially denied any connection with the death squads, but the denials rang hollow in Washington, even among Reagan's stalwarts. "Under the guise of anti-Communism, the death squads terrorized the entire country—murdering nuns, teachers, labor organizers, political opponents and thousands of other civilians," Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North wrote in his 1991 memoirs, Under Fire. 

North wrote that it was clear most of the death squad activity was the responsibility of the ultra right ARENA party and its leader, former Salvadoran army major Roberto D'Aubuisson. D'Aubuisson was reportedly running one of the death squads linked to the assassination of San Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero—allegedly by hit men from the FDN predecessor, the Legion of September 15.

The official whose men were committing some of the worst abuses was a $90,000-a-year CIA asset, Colonel Nicholas Carranza, head of the government's feared Treasury Police. According to one account, CIA director Casey met personally with Carranza in the summer of 1983 and told him to "knock it off," or the CIA would kick him off the payroll. 

In phone conversations with Lister, Christopher Moore learned that his boss was "supposedly doing security consulting for the government of El Salvador." In June of 1982 Lister asked Moore to fly down and "babysit" a government contract for a few days while Lister returned to the United States to take care of some unspecified business. 

Moore agreed, and was off on what he would call the strangest trip of his life. 

Accompanying him on the eleven-day excursion, Moore said, was a man who introduced himself as the Salvadoran consul in Los Angeles. Since Moore spoke little Spanish, the man served as Moore's guide and interpreter. "They flew me down to this airbase that the French were building, and I had to take pictures of it," Moore said; it was his impression that Pyramid was bidding on a contract to provide security for the base. When he returned to El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, he settled into the downtown Ramada Inn. Then he and the Salvadoran consul attended a series of meetings with none other than Major Roberto D'Aubuisson. "That was probably the highlight of my life at that point," chuckled Moore, now an attorney in Los Angeles. "There I was, a reserve police officer who'd only been in the country for a couple days, and I was sitting in this office in downtown San Salvador across the desk from the man who ran the death squads. He had a gun lying on the top of his desk and had these filing cabinets pushed up against the windows of the office so nobody could shoot through them." 

At another meeting, Moore and D'Aubuisson were joined by Ray Prendes, the newly elected head of the Salvadoran Assembly and a powerful figure in the ruling Christian Democratic party. Prendes was on friendly terms with D'Aubuisson, Moore said, and both appeared to have some role in the award of the security contract Lister was seeking. 

Lister, in an interview with police, "said that Moore was a good kid who had gone down to El Salvador to take pictures of poorly planned and constructed security work at a port on the southwest tip of El Salvador." 

Moore was unsure if Lister's company ever got the security contract for the airbase, but he thought not. He left Lister's employ in 1983, soon after his boss began dealing in heavy weapons. "Ron was an arms dealer and was buying these semiautomatics, the ones the bad guys use, called MAC-10s. He also had semiautomatic Uzis, and he had gotten involved in selling something called RAW, which was a rifle-fired hand grenade. He was into a lot of things." 

Moore wasn't exaggerating. Between 1983 and 1986, the FBI opened up five separate investigations of Lister, all of which dealt with allegations of trafficking in illegal weapons and high-tech devices with foreign governments. In September 1983, Lister's and Blandón's company, Pyramid International, came under FBI scrutiny for Neutrality Act violations, which allegedly involved "the sale of weapons to El Salvador and the loan of money from Saudi Arabia to the Salvadoran government. Lister was also alleged to be attempting to sell arms to several other countries." Considering the fact that the Saudi government was heavily involved in financing covert operations for the Reagan Administration during the 1980s, it is perhaps not surprising that "no further information was ever developed" by the FBI. The Justice Department offered no explanation for why that probe was abandoned. 

Lister admits his company was dealing guns in El Salvador. He told Justice Department investigators that Blandón and Meneses "were the ones that opened the doors down there. . they had many connections in El Salvador. . .from their drug trafficking business." Lister sold Blandón numerous machine pistols, which Blandón told him he was sending to the Contras. "Anything that I gave him was for the purpose of the Contras," Lister insisted. 

An FBI informant told Justice Department inspectors that Norwin Meneses had spoken of obtaining night vision scopes from Lister in 1982, which the drug lord planned to sell to the Salvadoran government. Meneses intended to "use the proceeds from the night scopes to aid the Contras," the informant reported, but said the deal fell through. 

In October 1982, Pyramid International made a security proposal to Salvadoran defense minister General Jose Guillermo Garcia, a man linked by one human rights organization to death squad activities and the slaughter of hundreds of peasants at a village called El Mozote in December 1981. 

Pyramid's proposal, which L.A. police found in a 1986 drug raid, was written in Spanish and had "Confidential" stamped all over the front of it. It was entitled "Technical Proposal for an Urgent Project to Implement an Integral Security System for the Defence Ministry and the Major General of the Armed Forces of the Republic of El Salvador." The thick report described Pyramid as a unique consulting firm "dedicated to the maintenance of freedom, independence and free enterprise." The company only served clients "with a similar political orientation." 

That political orientation was spelled out in no uncertain terms: Pyramid International Security Consultants would "assist the new government in its goal to combat the tyrannical forces of the left side, promoted and assisted by the current governments of Nicaragua, Cuba and the Soviet Union." 

Lister's company outlined a variety of services it would provide for the sum of $189,911: bodyguard and armed escort services for Salvadoran public officials, including the president and top political and military leaders; protecting sensitive installations from sabotage and terrorism; and installing sophisticated electronic technology, including radio sensors and explosives detectors, at key military and industrial installations. Lister later explained the document as "a proposal to the current government in El Salvador to implement programs to assist them in different types of security operations, counter-measures type operations, dealing with the types of problems they had. . .. We did a whole study down there." 

But one of Lister's associates at the time, a San Diego arms manufacturer, said Pyramid's security proposal was actually just a cover for another operation, a covert one directed by the CIA. The company's real mission in El Salvador, he said, was to set up a weapons manufacturing facility to supply guns to the Contras in neighboring Honduras. In a series of interviews with investigative reporter Nick Schou of the L.A. Weekly in 1996 and 1997, arms maker Timothy LaFrance described Pyramid International as "a private vendor that the CIA used to do things [the agency] couldn't do." LaFrance, whose handiwork is so highly regarded that he has created custom-made weapons for Rambo films and episodes of Miami Vice, said he accompanied Lister to El Salvador at least twice, becoming involved as a weapons specialist and helping to set up facilities to make pistols for the Contras. 

Among the series of nameless biographies attached to Pyramid's proposal to the Salvadoran government, one employee is identified a "specialist in the design and manufacture of unique weapons." Lister's former office manager, Chris Moore, confirmed that "one of his [Lister's] friends, and I can't recall the name, was an arms maker in San Diego. He had a custom gun shop down there." 

LaFrance, who makes and modifies exotic automatic weapons for the military and law enforcement agencies in his San Diego manufacturing facility, was convinced Lister's consulting company had friends in high places. When he applied in Pyramid's name for a State Department permit to take high-powered weapons out of the United States, for example, LaFrance said, "It came back approved in two days. Usually it takes three months. We went down to Central America with two giant boxes full of machine guns and ammunition." 

LaFrance told Schou that their cover story for the trip was that they were there "to provide security, armor-proofing for vehicles, limos and homes. My end was the weapons [and] how to make a three-car stop if you're shot at." But the real purpose, LaFrance said, was to "set up an operation in El Salvador that would allow us to get around U.S. laws and supply the Contras with guns. It's much easier to build the weapons down there and that's eventually what we did." Pyramid's security proposal discusses the company's unique ability "to design and manufacture special equipment—at the point—and in any part of the world, in the majority of cases saving their foreign clients important sums in currency." 

According to LaFrance, the Pyramid team moved into a mass-transit center run by the military in downtown San Salvador. "That's where we made the weapons. You could have 50 guys working in a machine shop and nobody would know it," he said. After the finished guns were transported to a Salvadoran military airstrip in Morazon province, they were airlifted to Contra camps in Honduras. "We made almost all of our drops by helicopter, buzzing the treetops," LaFrance said. 

While LaFrance's story is by its nature difficult to corroborate, some independent documentation suggests he was definitely the man to see in the early 1980s if one needed to build a weapons plant. In May 1983 LaFrance was solicited by the tiny Cabazon Indian tribe in southern California to build an arms factory on their desolate, tumbleweed-strewn Riverside County reservation. "We need the know-how from an organization engaged in the manufacturing of armaments of various types, all consisting of technology not currently found on the marketplace," the Cabazons' letter to LaFrance Specialties stated. Another letter spelled out precisely what the Cabazons were looking to build: "A 9-mm machine pistol, an assault rifle with laser sighting, a long-distance sniper rifle, a portable rocket system, a night-vision scope, and a battlefield communications system 'that cannot be detected by current technology.'" 

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Cabazons were working on "a series of international military and security projects that seem to be lifted from the pages of a spy novel." The tribal administrator was a man who claimed to have long experience working for the CIA, helping out on the agency's Chilean destabilization program in the 1970s. He had paired the tribe up with Wackenhut International Inc., a security firm the Chronicle described as being "led by former officials of the CIA, the FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Department and federal law enforcement." 

Wackenhut was very active in El Salvador during the Contra war, providing employees to protect the U.S. embassy and other installations, and doing "things you wouldn't want your mother to know about," one Wackenhut employee told Spy magazine in 1992. Apparently the firm was using the Cabazon reservation's tax-exempt status and its freedom from federal oversight to gain a competitive advantage in soliciting federal weapons projects. 

Freelance investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was looking into the Cabazon/Wackenhut projects as part of a larger conspiracy investigation at the time he was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, allegedly a suicide victim. He had told friends he was convinced that "spies, arms merchants and others were using the reservation as a low-profile site on which to develop weapons for Third World armies, including the Nicaraguan Contras." The Chronicle stated that Contra leader Eden Pastora had visited a firing range near the reservation for a weapons demonstration in 1981, a claim Pastora has both confirmed and denied on separate occasions. 

In early 1994 the U.S. Justice Department announced that it was opening "a nationwide investigation" into Casolaro's suspicious death—a probe ordered by then associate attorney general Webb Hubbell. Not long afterward Hubbell pleaded guilty to crimes he'd committed while an Arkansas lawyer and resigned from the Justice Department. What resulted from the Casolaro investigation, or even whether it ever went forward, has not been made public. 

Hubbell's interest in the journalist's death may have been more than passing curiosity. Hubbell had his own connections to a company that was making weapons parts for the Contras. 

Tim LaFrance's story about setting up an arms factory with Ronald Lister in El Salvador bears striking similarities to one told by Terry Reed, a former air force intelligence officer and FBI informant who became involved with the CIA's Contra project in the mid-1980s. Reed, a pilot and machine tool expert, said he was initially recruited to train would-be Contra pilots at a clandestine airstrip near Nella, Arkansas. Later, he claims, he was asked to help the CIA set up secret weapons parts facilities in Arkansas and, later, in Mexico.

In his memoirs, Compromised, Reed wrote that he scouted locations and provided the corporate shell for CIA agents working with the Contras to set up and run a sophisticated machine-tool shop in Mexico in 1985–86, in order to keep a supply of untraceable weapons parts flowing to the Contras during a time when Congress had cut off the rebels' CIA assistance. He claims CIA operatives were shipping cocaine through the machine-tool company he'd helped the agency set up in Guadalajara, Mexico. One of the companies Reed worked with in Arkansas was a small manufacturer of parking meters called Park On Meter Inc., located in the town of Russellville. Reed claimed that the company was secretly manufacturing parts for M-16 rifles as a subcontractor on a CIA weapons project to supply the Contras. 

The Washington Post sent a reporter to Arkansas in 1994 to "investigate" Reed's story. While the resultant article was a snide and ham-handed attempt to portray Reed as a crackpot conspiracy theorist, it nonetheless confirmed many of the basic elements of his story. "Some of the key relationships described in the book did exist in some form," the Post grudgingly admitted. "The Iver Johnson arms company near Little Rock, which the book portrays as being at the center of the gun-manufacturing effort, did ship a load of weapons to Nicaragua through a Mexican distributor, according to former plant engineer J. A. Matejko. But Matejko, described in the book as part of the CIA plan, says the rifles were M-1s, not M-16's." Moreover, the Post found, the parking meter company Reed named "did make some gun parts for Iver Johnson, another relationship characterized in the book as part of the CIA weapons scheme." But, the Post scoffed, the parts were "firing pins, not M-16 bolts as the book contends." 

Park On Meter's former secretary and corporate lawyer was Webb Hubbell, who also happens to be the brother-inlaw of the company's owner. Hubbell admitted to a Time magazine reporter that POM was also making rocket launchers. 

Another similarity between the weapons operations described by Reed and LaFrance is that they both involved admitted drug traffickers who appeared to be working for the U.S. government. A central figure in all of Reed's dealings with the CIA, he wrote, was a CIA and DEA contract agent named Adler Berriman Seal. A former airline pilot, Seal moved in 1982 from Baton Rouge to a tiny airfield in isolated Mena, Arkansas, Intermountain Regional Airport, and began running drugs and weapons. 

In the early 1980s, Barry Seal was one of the biggest cocaine and marijuana importers in the southern United States, flying loads in directly for the Medellín cartel and airdropping them with pinpoint precision across Louisiana, Arkansas, and other southern states. 

"Seal detailed his cocaine-smuggling activities in '81, '82 and '83. What he testified to was that he was involved in 50 trips during those three years," IRS spokesman Henry Holms told the Baton Rouge State Times in 1986, explaining a $29 million lien that the IRS filed against Seal for back taxes. A letter that year from Louisiana's attorney general to U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese said Seal "smuggled between $3 billion and $5 billion worth of drugs into the U.S." 

Seal's farm in Baton Rouge, according to a 1983 U.S. Customs report, was allegedly used as a drop site for cocaine and marijuana flown into the country aboard a DC4 aircraft, N90201. That same plane subsequently turned up flying supplies for the Contras in 1985 through an air cargo company the FDN hired called Hondu Carib Cargo Inc. The operator of Hondu Carib, records show, was FDN leader Adolfo Calero's brother, Mario Calero. 

Hondu Carib's owner was pilot Frank Moss, identified in a 1989 Senate report as having "been investigated, although never indicted, for narcotics offenses by ten different law enforcement agencies." The report said Moss flew FDN supply missions for both Hondu Carib and a Honduran air freight company called SETCO, which was owned by Honduras's biggest drug trafficker, Juan Matta Ballesteros. 

One DC-4 Moss used to ferry Contra supplies was seized by the DEA in March 1987 on a suspected drug run off Florida's coast. Aboard the plane was marijuana residue and Moss' notes which, according to a CIA cable, contained "the names of two CIA officers and their telephone numbers." Also found was the phone number of Robert Owen, Oliver North's courier in Central America. (In 1985, records show, Owen reported to Oliver North that a DC-6 owned by Mario Calero "which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.") 

During the time he was dealing with Terry Reed, Seal was also working for the DEA as a top-level informant; in 1984 he participated in a joint CIA-DEA sting operation in an attempt to snare Sandinista government officials in drug smuggling. Congressional records show North was being regularly briefed by the CIA on Seal's sting operation, was supplied with some of the evidence it produced, and allegedly leaked the information to the press shortly before a critical vote on Contra aid was coming up in Congress. North maintains that his only involvement in the Seal sting against the Sandinistas was as an observer, but a statement he gave to the FBI in June 1986 suggests that his relationship with the trafficker was considerably more complex than that. 

On February 17, 1986, Seal was murdered in New Orleans by Colombian hit men. Four months later, in June, North called the FBI and claimed that there was an "active measures program" being directed against him by the Sandinistas. People were following him, he fretted, directing death threats and smears against him. "North expressed further concern that he may be targeted for elimination by organized crime due to his alleged involvement in drug running," a Washington-based FBI agent wrote. North pointed to "the murder on Feb. 17, 1986 of a DEA agent, Steele [sic], on the date prior to Steele's testifying against the Sandinistas for drug involvement." 

Seal's "personal records showed him to be a contract CIA operative both before and during his years of drug running in Mena in the 1980s," historian Roger Morris, a former NSC staffer, wrote in a 1996 book, Partners in Power, about Bill and Hillary Clinton. 

The same Senate subcommittee that looked into the Contras' connections with Hondu Carib in 1988 also poked around at Mena and concluded that "associates of Seal who operated aircraft service businesses at the Mena, Arkansas, airport were also the targets of grand jury probes into narcotics trafficking. Despite the availability of evidence sufficient for an indictment on money laundering charges, and over the strong protests of State and federal law enforcement officials, the cases were dropped. The apparent reason was that the prosecution might have revealed national security information." 

Clinton's critics have charged that it was impossible for the governor of Arkansas to have been unaware of Seal's activities at Mena. Indeed, Reed and former Arkansas state troopers L. D. Brown and Larry Patterson, both of whom have been critical of Clinton, insist he knew quite a bit about it—including the fact that cocaine was involved. Patterson, a member of Governor Clinton's security detail, testified that he and other troopers were aware "that there was large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena airport, large quantities of money, large quantities of guns, that there was an ongoing operation training foreign people in that area. That it was a CIA operation."

A mechanic at Mena airport, John Bender, swore in a deposition that he saw Clinton there three times in 1985. Ex-trooper Brown said that when he confronted Clinton about the cocaine flights Seal was involved in, Governor Clinton replied, "That's Lasater's deal," referring to his close friend and campaign contributor, Little Rock bond broker Danny Ray Lasater. In 1986 Lasater was indicted by a federal grand jury in Little Rock on drug charges, and Clinton's brother Roger, a cocaine addict, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Lasater pleaded guilty to drug trafficking; he received a thirty-month prison sentence but served only six months in prison. Clinton pardoned him in 1990. 

Clinton's supporters have maintained that Lasater was no drug dealer, simply a high-flying businessman who got a little too caught up in the fast life. But that's not the way the FBI described it in a 1988 report citing the bureau's successful battles against major drug trafficking organizations. According to the FBI's description of its investigation, Lasater was part of a huge drug ring. "In December 1986, the Little Rock, Arkansas office of the FBI concluded a four-year Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force investigation involving the cocaine trafficking activities of a prominent Little Rock businessman who operated several banking investment firms and brokerages in Arkansas and Florida," the FBI report stated. "The investigation revealed that this businessman was the main supplier of cocaine to the investment banking and bond community in the Little Rock area, which has the largest bond community in the United States outside of New York City. This task force investigation resulted in the conviction of this businessman and 24 codefendants to jail sentences ranging from four months to 10 years, as well as the seizure of cocaine, marijuana, an automobile, an airplane and $77,000." 

Typically, investigations conducted by federal Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) units target top-level criminal organizations, not businessmen who take a few toots every now and then. Researchers familiar with the Lasater investigation say that the FBI's description of its Little Rock investigation goes far beyond anything that has ever been publicly released about the Lasater probe. 

Roger Morris's book, in fact, describes an investigation that was shut down prematurely and ended only with Lasater's arrest, not that of twenty-four others. But Morris also suggested that there was much more to the case than met the eye: "Whatever the limits or extent of Lasater's cocaine trafficking or the nature of his other dealings, most believed that beyond him the larger corruption in Little Rock and elsewhere pointed unmistakably to organized crime, not to mention the vast crimes of Mena—none of which would be pursued." 

Morris wrote that "in sworn testimony, a former staff member of the Arkansas State Police Intelligence Unit would describe 'a shredding party' in which she was ordered to purge the state's Mena files of nearly a thousand documents, including those referring specifically to Iran/Contra conspirator Oliver North and Seal associate Terry Reed." Reed claims that North, who was the National Security Council official overseeing the Contra project at the time, was his CIA contact for both the pilot-training program and the machine-tool company front. 

A Clinton spokesman called the reports of Clinton's alleged knowledge of the Mena operations "the darkest backwater of the right wing conspiracy industry." North, who certainly knew about Barry Seal, has denied knowing anything about Terry Reed or what was going on at Mena. But something was certainly happening at that little airport, and it was far from routine. While denying that the CIA was involved in any illegal activities at Mena during the time Seal's drug-smuggling operation was based there, the CIA's Inspector General's Office confirmed in 1996 that the CIA ran a "joint training operation with another federal agency at Mena Intermountain Airport." The IG report, which has never been publicly released, reportedly claims the exercise lasted only two weeks, but conveniently omits the year this occurred. The CIA also used the Mena airport for "routine aviation related services" on CIA-owned planes, according to a declassified summary of the report. 

Coincidentally, it was Seal's drug-hauling airplane, a Fairchild C-123K called The Fat Lady, that a Sandinista soldier blew out of the skies over Nicaragua in 1986 with a SAM-7 missile, breaking open the Iran-Contra scandal. The plane had been based at Mena before Seal sold it and it began flying weapons-hauling missions for Oliver North and the FDN. 

Morris wrote that Seal also worked for the Pentagon's spy service, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), "where coded records reportedly showed him on the payroll beginning in 1982." Tim LaFrance told L.A. journalist Nick Schou that the DIA was also involved in Ronald Lister's weapons manufacturing plant in El Salvador, and that the meetings Lister and his associates had with death squad commander D'Aubuisson "happened because the DIA wanted them to happen." Records found in Ronald Lister's house in the 1986 raid disclosed connections between Lister and "a DIA subcontractor." 

Another man involved in Lister's Salvadoran weapons operation, LaFrance said, was Richard E. Wilker, a former Laguna Beach resident whom LaFrance described as an ex-CIA agent. Wilker appears as the "technical director" on Pyramid International's proposal of the security project to the Salvadoran government. The biography section of the proposal boasts that the company had "technicians with the Central Intelligence Agency in physical security for 20 years." 

"I met Lister through Wilker," LaFrance said. "Wilker had heard about my stuff from the Agency. He said he had a friend who wanted to talk about a deal. I called to check and Langley said he [Wilker] was still working for the Agency. So I started doing business with Lister and Wilker." Lister was not officially a CIA employee, according to LaFrance; "He wasn't getting a paycheck from them. He may have said he did but his connection was. . .with Wilker. Very few people ever work directly for the Agency." 

Former CIA officer John Vandewerker, who once employed Wilker as a salesman, said he knew Lister and Wilker were involved in some business activity in El Salvador. "It was kind of touchy. . .as far as getting out of the country and all that kind of stuff." He did not elaborate. (Coincidentally, Vandewerker's name was found in the notebooks of investigative reporter Danny Casolaro after his death, in connection with the goings-on at the Cabazon reservation.) 

Pyramid was eventually tossed out of El Salvador at the urging of the U.S. Army, which took over the weapons plant that he and Pyramid had started, LaFrance said. Lister dismisses any suggestion that he was "knowingly" working for the CIA. In an interview with police in 1996, he claimed "that if he were affiliated with an organization like the CIA, he wouldn't talk about it." He confirmed, the detectives wrote, that he had been a "security consultant and had dealings and offices down in El Salvador. Lister said he had a 'Munitions Control Permit' at that time and was involved in legal arms sales." The detectives noted that "Lister did display some knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community during our interview."

Danilo Blandón met Lister very early through the FDN organization in Los Angeles and began an association with him that would last until the late 1980s. Lister and a partner named Bill Downing, Blandón said, "went to the meeting that we have in the Contra revolution, the meeting that we have every week and they, they offer us, they show us, you know, they show us a demonstration for the weapons, okay? They show the machine guns and the weapons. They have the, the license to sell them." 

Lister never sold guns to the Contras, according to Blandón. That was true, but not entirely accurate, Norwin Meneses said during a 1996 interview: "We, in fact, did make arrangements to sell arms to the Contras, but the FDN couldn't collect sufficient funds in order to finalize the deal." Meneses, Blandón, and Lister then "traveled to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to make arrangements with local governments" for the donation of arms, Meneses said. 

"Lister and Blandón then continued their mission in South America without me. . .. I know Danilo says that the weapons he got came through Ronnie Lister, but that isn't true. If I told you where we got them, governments would fall," Meneses said mysteriously. "I'm not going to do it while I'm in this place." He motioned to the walls of the Nicaraguan prison where he was interviewed and made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger, which he pointed at his head. 

Meneses's own involvement in Contra gun running was confirmed in 1996 by the New York Times, which quoted an unnamed Clinton administration official as saying that Meneses had "contacts with the Contras in Honduras in 1982 or 1983 and 1984, and that he was believed then to have had some involvement in arms smuggling as well as money laundering and drugs." The Times also quoted two other unnamed government officials as saying, "Intelligence reports showed that Mr. Meneses was thought to have sent some weapons for the Contras on at least one occasion. But the size and nature of the shipment are unclear." 

"There is a mention of weapons with him but not an indication whether it was a standard or large pipeline," the Times quoted "one official" as saying. The Times article provided no further details on this stunning revelation. 

The Los Angeles Times, in a 1996 profile that portrayed Lister as a loudmouth who told tall tales, confirmed Meneses statements that Lister was involved in weapons transactions with him. Quoting an unidentified "former business associate" of Lister, the paper wrote that Lister "led a sales team on a futile mission to civil war-racked [sic] El Salvador in the summer of 1982 to market surplus American arms, military equipment and used school buses to the Salvadoran military. . .. The trip was financed, the associate said, with an investment of at least $20,000 from Norwin Meneses." 

The trip was a failure, according to the Times, because Lister tried to arrange the deal through an unnamed leader of an unnamed political party. Afterward Lister tried to get involved in the cocaine business with Meneses, but the drug kingpin allegedly turned him down, supposedly because Meneses regarded Lister as "a loose cannon." The story did not explain how or where Lister would have picked up enough "surplus" American arms to approach the Salvadoran military about making a weapons deal. 

When defense attorneys tried in 1996 to quiz Blandón about Lister's alleged relationship with the CIA, a federal prosecutor immediately objected, and the jury was ordered out of the courtroom. During a whispered conversation with the judge, the prosecutor said that while it was true that "Lister made a claim. . .that he was an employee of the CIA," the government believed it was false, made only to "impress [his] illegal business partners," and was an attempt "to deter prosecution." 

Nevertheless the prosecutor asked the judge to halt that line of inquiry because it was "muddying the waters." The judge decided that since Blandón had denied that Lister worked for the government, there was no need for any more questions like that. An internal CIA investigation in 1997 declared that Lister had no relationship with the agency. 

Chris Moore, who regarded Lister's claims of CIA connections with some skepticism, said Lister told him he had a "big CIA contact" at an Orange County company. 

"I can't remember his name, but Ron was always was running off to meetings with him supposedly," Moore said. "Ron said the guy was the former Deputy Director of Operations or something, real high up there. All I know is that this supposed contact of his was working at the Fluor Corporation [an international construction management company based in Orange County] because I had to call Ron out there a couple times." In an interview with the Justice Department, Blandón "recalled hearing Lister say that he was involved with the CIA and that he knew someone high up in the CIA who was getting him some licenses so he could sell weapons to Iran." Blandón said he "never believed Lister because he lied too much." Years later, however, evidence would surface suggesting that Lister's claims of having a big CIA contact weren't as wild eyed as Blandón and Moore seemed to think. 

In many ways, the relationship between Lister—the ex-cop weapons dealer—and Blandón—the MBA-toting cocaine broker—was symbiotic 

Lister when he first met Blandón, "knew nothing about narcotics and could not tell you coke from flour. I had never seen the shit." But after Lister returned from his Central American travels, his former San Diego attorney said, he appeared to be an expert in the cocaine business. "When he came back, he seemed to know a lot about what was going on in Colombia with drug trafficking. I thought it was interesting because in the mid-1980s, no one knew very much about these cartels. But he knew quite a bit. And he knew names and dates, places, et cetera. 

"I can remember one incident in particular. In the papers at the time all of a sudden there were these stories about the Medellín cartel, and Ron just snorted and said, 'What the hell is with the news media? There are all these stories about the Medellín cartel and nothing about the Cali cartel.' Ron said the Cali cartel is where all the power is concentrated, that's where the power structure is, and no one is even bothering them. They're getting ready to expand their market to Europe. They're buying cargo ships and airplanes.' Well, I'd never heard of the Cali cartel at that point. Subsequent events certainly proved him right." 

The attorney surmised that Lister could have gained "this information from the CIA, or through his work with them. He knew some pretty damned good details and professed to being through the area. Now, I have traveled extensively through Central America, and the only thing I can tell you is, his information about the area was true. I know he'd been there." Lister told CIA inspectors that he had been to Colombia with Blandón and observed Blandón negotiating drug deals with the Colombians. 

As 1982 drew to a close, Blandón's cocaine trafficking business in Los Angeles exploded. Almost overnight, it appears, he went from receiving little one, or two-kilo packages that could be tucked inside a lunch box to getting multimillion-dollar loads that wouldn't fit on a wheelbarrow. "I'd go over to D's [Blandón's] house, take my Mercedes over there, put three U-Haul boxes which will cover about 100 keys, about 33 per box plus one you'd squeeze in, in the trunk, go over to south L.A.," Lister told police. "It was the slickest deal you've ever seen." 

There were two interrelated reasons for this huge expansion of Blandón's cocaine trafficking. One is that Dr. Raul Jeri's much-ridiculed "epidemic" of cocaine smoking had finally arrived in Los Angeles. And the other was a street-smart ghetto teenager who would come to be known as Freeway Rick.

7

"Something happened to Ivan" 

The man who would be king of the L.A. crack market saw his first rock of cocaine around Christmastime in 1979 and didn't believe it was a drug. Ricky Donnell Ross knew what drugs looked like. He was nineteen. He'd seen drugs before. But this sure didn't look like cocaine to him. It was a little whitish chunk of something that could have been bird shit, for all he knew. And you were supposed to put it in a pipe and smoke it? Right. 

Ross had seen people on TV using cocaine before, and they never smoked any shit that looked like this. When they used it, they cut it up on a mirror with a razor blade and tooted it up with a hundred-dollar bill. 

"It was glamorous. It was, you know, you was in the 'in' crowd if you was into cocaine, if you was using. You know, whatever. It was in," Ross said. "It was what the movie stars were doing." 

Ross's skepticism seems hard to believe now, with crack dealers more plentiful than policemen in urban communities. But in 1979 it was understandable. At that point, hardly anyone had seen rock cocaine. The friend who gave Rick what he called "a fifty-dollar rock" knew about smokable cocaine only because he was traveling in the fast lane. He was on the San Jose State University football team. He went to a lot of high-class parties. He knew what was happening. 

"He's like, 'Man, I'm onto something new,'" Ross would later tell the Los Angeles Times in 1994. According to the Times, "Ross ventured out and showed off his acquisition to an old pimp, who fired it right up and ordered $100 more."

The problem was, Ross didn't have any more. He didn't know how to make it or where to get it. And it's doubtful he could have found more even if he had the money, which he didn't. 

If he'd searched hard enough in the right neighborhoods, maybe in Malibu or Hollywood, Ricky Ross might have been able to come up with something close—freebase cocaine. Freebase was becoming popular in the upper echelons of the drug underground in the late 1970s. It was not crack, however. Making freebase was more complicated and dangerous, requiring exotic and highly flammable solvents. It was also different in content. 

Freebase resulted from mixing cocaine powder with ether. When the ether evaporated, it took the adulterants and cutting agents with it, leaving behind smokable crystals of pure cocaine base. For the process to work, however, it required a very high-quality cocaine; the cocaine powder that most people snorted wouldn't do because it was so heavily cut. Adding ether to a mishmash of mannitol, lidocaine, or milk sugar caused some "cocaine" to evaporate entirely. 

Freebasing was what comedian Richard Pryor had been doing when he set himself on fire on June 9, 1980, and ran screaming from his bedroom in Northridge, outside L.A.—a ball of blazing polyester leaping across neatly kept lawns. "His polyester shirt had melted onto his arms and chest and he suffered third-degree burns from the waist up," Time magazine reported. "The Los Angeles police say Pryor told them that the accident occurred while he was 'free-basing' cocaine." 

Pryor would later say freebasing was only tangentially related to his fearful scorching. The fire happened because he accidentally ignited some 151-proof rum while in a daze from a seventy-two-hour freebasing binge. If he'd been smoking freebase, in fact, he might never have burned himself at all; Pryor said he started drinking the rum because he'd run out of cocaine. 

The distinction didn't matter much to the news media. The fact that Pryor—a major celebrity—had an accident while in the clutches of some weird, exotic new drug habit made it big news. "When Cocaine Can Kill," Newsweek trumpeted. "A dangerous drug craze" is how People Weekly put it. The Los Angeles Times discovered to its alarm that in the mostly black NBA, freebase use was spreading among pro basketball players. 

As one cocaine expert wrote in 1982, the coverage of Pryor's accident was "reminiscent of the pre-Harrison Act yellow journalism [and] told the story of how cocaine was becoming the modern version of the Black cocaine menace of the early 1900s." The Harrison Act of 1914, which outlawed recreational cocaine use in the United States, resulted from a wild—and bogus—newspaper campaign mounted by southern sheriffs who linked coke crazed black studs to the rapes of white women. 

For a variety of reasons, including the bad press from Pryor's misfortune, freebasing was largely a passing fad, never really taking hold except among a few rich, hard-core drug users. "The relatively high cost and difficulty of producing cocaine free-base made it less accessible to most cocaine users," drug researcher Steven Belenko wrote in 1993. "An estimated 10% of cocaine users in the late 1970s also used free-base cocaine. But the need for large quantities of relatively pure cocaine and volatile chemicals to produce free-base limited its appeal to the broader group of cocaine users." 

Unlike Richard Pryor's neighborhood, the neighborhood where Ricky Ross lived rarely saw cocaine in any form. As hard as the drug was to find in white, middle-class communities, it was ten times as scarce in South Central L.A., where the Ross family had lived since the early 1960s. People in the projects didn't have that kind of money, and if every once in a while they did, they sure as hell didn't go out and spend it all on white powder that barely got you high. 

According to a Rand Institute study of street prices paid by DEA agents and informants, an ounce of cocaine powder in L.A. was selling for $4,844 in 1979. Other sources place it at roughly $2,500 an ounce, suggesting that DEA agents weren't the savviest shoppers around. In any event, a tiny bit cost about half the average annual income of a South Central resident. Little wonder that marijuana and angel dust—a dangerous chemical known in the projects as "Sherm" or "water"—were the drugs of choice where Ricky Ross lived. They were far less expensive. That was why Thomas C. "Tootie" Reese, the alleged king of cocaine in black L.A. at the time, lamented that he never sold as much coke as the cops and the press claimed. 

"When you mentioned drugs, whether it was heroin or coke, you heard Tootie's name," said former LAPD narcotic detective Steven Polak. "He was the kingpin, especially in the fifties and sixties. Everybody was working Tootie Reese. Tootie Reese was probably one of the first blacks who really did big dope." But the man himself had a different story for the L.A. Times, which interviewed him a few months after his arrest in December 1983 for selling two kilos of cocaine to undercover officers. 

"I ain't never been big," Tootie told the Times. Some evidence gathered during the investigation of Reese backed up his assertion that his cocaine-dealing prowess had been greatly overrated. During a taped conversation with undercover agents, Reese told them that "most of his customers purchase only five ounces or 10 ounces and that he had only five kilo-size customers." That admission was made at a time when a much bigger dealer in South Central—Danilo Blandón—was moving dozens of kilos a month through just one customer. Reese was mostly a heroin and marijuana dealer. By the early 1980s, when cocaine started seeping into the inner cities in noticeable amounts, Reese was a dinosaur. 

"These new kids, once the eighties hit and these gangs hooked up with this dope, he was nothing anymore," ex-detective Polak said. "He was just an old grandpa who'd lost his teeth and wasn't worth anything anymore." A 1989 L.A. Times Magazine piece wrote him off in similar terms: "The amounts of cocaine he allegedly dealt were infinitesimal contrasted with the tonnage now sold monthly by his successors in the black community." 

Reese's first major successor would be Ricky Ross, though that was not readily apparent in late 1979. Looking at him then, one would not have imagined the slender, slightly pop-eyed teenager to be a successor to anything but a hard row to hoe. A sometime thief, sometime student, he was clinging to a tattered dream of becoming a professional tennis player. Though too small for football or basketball, Ross had quick reflexes. When he was in middle school, about eleven or twelve, two family friends, Dr. Mal Bouquet and Richard Williams, encouraged him to take up tennis.

Ross's own father, Sonny, an oil tank cleaner by trade, had left home while Ross was still a small child in Tyler, Texas, in 1963. The rest of Ross's life would be spent in a sometimes tragic quest to find someone to replace him. Bouquet and Williams became Ross's first father figures. "They picked me up, took me to tennis tournaments. They took care of my racquets and tennis shoes, stuff like that," Ross said. "They fed me. You know, we'd leave a tournament, we'd go to McDonald's, something like that." 

Ross said the tournaments and tennis practices kept him out of the 74 Hoover Crips, his neighborhood gang. He was friends with many of them, he said, but was never a gang member himself. Federal prison records appear to back up that claim. "There exists no information to substantiate your membership in the Los Angeles based 'Crips' street gang," stated a 1993 letter to Ross from the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix. "All information in your file has been deleted which reflected gang participation or membership." 

"He does not have the culture of a gang member when you talk to him," said L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz, who spent months interviewing Ross in 1994 for a major series on the L.A. crack market. "He doesn't have the attitude and the—I mean, he was a capitalist." 

It wasn't because Ross had anything against gangs necessarily. Most of the 74 Hoovers were homies he'd grown up with, gone to school with. He would put them to use in the future. But for now, he just didn't have time for gang-banging. "Once I started playing tennis, we'd start practicing as soon as school was out, so we'd get off the tennis court probably around 6:00 or 7:00 when it was time to go in the house." 

It was hard to get away with anything there. His mother, Annie, a heavyset woman with bottle-thick glasses, a janitor in downtown office buildings, was strict. She was always checking up on him and his older brother David, snooping in their rooms to make sure they weren't getting into trouble. When she was at work, her younger sister Luetha Wilson watched the boys. 

By the time Ross enrolled in Dorsey High School, his tennis skills were well honed. "I made All-League my first year. My second year, I made All-City second team and my senior year, I made All-City first team," Ross said. But he didn't fare as well in tournaments. "I'd win a few rounds. I never got ranked." 

Still, Ross played well enough to retain a spot on the Dorsey High tennis team. Playing tennis for a major university was his immediate goal in life. There were about five players on his high school team that the coaches were grooming for college scholarships, and he was proud to consider himself one of them. 

Ross had a bit of a problem, though. By his senior year at Dorsey, he still couldn't read or write. "My teachers just passed me, gave me C's and let me go through," Ross shrugged. It hardly seemed to matter, he said, because you didn't need it to play tennis. And in truth, it hadn't mattered. It hadn't kept him off the courts. It hadn't kept him behind in school. It only mattered when he started practicing with the Long Beach State University tennis team. 

Ross had played in a tournament in Griffith Park, "and I had beat the number three or four guy from Long Beach State and a [Long Beach] coach asked me what school I was going to, when I was graduating from high school. Basically, he asked me, you know, what was I doing and how is my tennis going and stuff like that." The coach invited him over to the university for practice, and Ross worked out with the Long Beach State team a couple of times. "Then he found out about my grades and that I couldn't read or write," Ross said. To Ross's shock, that was the end of the university's interest. "I thought it basically would be the same as it had been all the time," Ross complained. "That they would just keep passing me through." 

Disillusioned, he dropped out of Dorsey soon afterward, saying that it seemed pointless if he couldn't get into college. "I didn't graduate. I made it to the 12th grade and I was a few credits from being able to graduate." Ross said he was "kinda like in no man's land, almost, I would say. . .. My life was like at a standstill." On July 7, 1978, he was arrested by the LAPD for burglary and disorderly conduct. The charges would be dismissed—Ross said it was a case of mistaken identity—but the incident was an indication of the path he was on. 

Ricky's other passion in life was automobiles, so he channeled his efforts in that direction. Since childhood, his mother said, "Ricky was taking things apart and putting them back together." Every summer she took the boys back to her brother's house in Overton, Texas, where Ricky and David would work on the brother's farm. Ricky began tooling around on tractors at an early age and developed driving skills quickly. 

"When Ricky was about four years old he tried to drive my brother's car," Annie Ross said. "By the time he was eleven or twelve, he was driving by himself. You know, out in the country, where nobody minded. When he got older, he'd bring these cars home, work on them all the time, fix them up, and sell them. He always kept himself real busy." 

In 1979, as Ross prepared to leave tennis behind, he prevailed upon someone he'd met through the sport, Mr. Fisher, a young auto upholstery teacher at the Venice Skills Center, to give him a shot at a new career. Fisher, a sometime tennis partner, got Ross into an open slot at the skills center. 

"It's like a trade school where people that don't have nothing going can go and get them a trade, and they pay them," Ross said. "They pay them something really for going, you know, like help you with your expenses and stuff like that for going to the school." It was a nice favor, and Ross began attending auto repair classes. Then tennis came calling again. 

Pete Brown, a coach at L.A. Trade Tech Junior College, asked Ross if he'd like to come to the technical school, learn a trade, and play tennis for him. Jubilantly, Ross quit the skills center and went running to Trade Tech. He had made a college team after all. "He was a very good player," recalled Brown. "I'd say he was probably my number-three guy on the team at the time." Ross recalled that he "played number one and number two at different times of the season. You know, like sometimes one guy would beat me and sometimes I would beat him. So we would go back and forth." 

By then Ross had drifted away from his two childhood tennis mentors, Bouquet and Williams. Ross was embarrassed by his failure to get a scholarship, and he sensed that Williams wasn't eager to have him around anymore, since it was clear he wasn't going to make a major university team. 

Ross began spending more time with Mr. Fisher, the upholstery teacher, and the two played tennis together frequently. Ross soon adopted Fisher as a father figure. "Me and him, we would go play, you know, what we called hitting. I would hit with him, because they like to hit with people that's better than them, and in return he would buy me tennis shoes, racquets, help me get—like if I couldn't get a racquet strung, I could call him and say that, you know, 'I need my racquet strung' and he would pay for it." 

Fisher, Ross said, "was considered an uppity black guy. He was single. He stayed in the Baldwin Hills area, which is a nicer part of Los Angeles. He had a brand-new Cadillac, you know, nice jewelry, school teacher." Ross said he would "go by his house from time to time" after getting off school at Trade Tech, where the illiterate Ross, ironically, was studying bookbinding.

As the two became closer, Fisher let his guard down. In 1981, shortly before he left Trade Tech, Ross found out why Mr. Fisher was able to afford jewelry and brand-new Cadillacs on a trade school teacher's salary. "We had a conversation one day. I found out that he was dealing and also using narcotics. I'm not exactly sure how the conversation came up but we started talking about it and he started explaining to me what it was all about." 

Ross said he was glad the topic arose. At this point in his life, he was looking for any way to make a buck, and it really didn't matter if it was legal or not. He'd crossed that threshold already. "Actually, when he explained it to me, I wanted to know more about it, so I started asking him more questions," Ross said. "He showed me some. It was about as big as a match head and he said, 'Well, this right here is worth $50 and you can sell this and it just keeps getting better and better,' is basically what he said." 

Ross mulled it over. Selling cocaine certainly seemed a lot better and a lot less risky than stealing and stripping cars, which is what he'd been doing to put himself through Trade Tech. He discussed it with his running partner, Ollie Newell, known as "Big Loc" because some people thought he acted crazy. Newell, who'd just gotten out of jail and needed money, agreed that selling dope looked like a lot less work for a lot more money. 

But Ross had one reservation: all the dope dealers he knew eventually got fucked up on their own product. Nothing was more pathetic than seeing a burned-out old dealer begging nickels and dimes from his former clients. That wasn't the way Ricky Ross envisioned his life ending. 

"Ollie was kinda like the one that kinda like coerced me into getting into the business," Ross said. "You know, he's like, 'Come on, man, you can do it, you don't mess around with nothing, you don't smoke, you don't drink, you're clean, you can handle it.'" 

Ross made up his mind. They went back to see Mr. Fisher and announced that they were ready to try it out. Ross said Fisher gave them "a fifty-dollar piece" and "we went to a neighborhood and tried to sell it." 

It was not an encouraging start. "We got beat out of it," Ross said. "We gave it to somebody and they said they was going to pay us later and it didn't happen." Ross said he had to go slinking back to Fisher to tell him about the "sale," but he assured the teacher that "the guy was going to pay me the money, and he said, 'Okay, don't worry about it.'" 

Chastened, Ross and Newell regrouped for another try. They scoped out the parking lot at Bret Harte Junior High, their alma mater, and stole a car from a faculty member. Selling the fancy wheels brought them $250, and a week or so after their first debacle, they went strutting back to Fisher's house with their hard-earned cash. 

"We bought what's called an 8-track of cocaine from him. It's three grams of cocaine. At that time, it probably was about a gram of cocaine and about two grams of cut." Taking the 8-track for $250, they cut it again and sold it off in bits and pieces. "We could take it to our neighborhood where we stayed at and it would sell for [a total of] five, six hundred dollars. . .. I think the first time we might have made about $600 off it. . .an awful lot of money." 

Instead of spending the profits, Ross said, they went back to Fisher's house and ordered more cocaine. "Sold it, made more money," Ross said. "I didn't really know the game. It was like we were just stumbling through, you know what I'm saying? Picking up as we go." 

Ross said the amount of cash he was able to bring in scared him. 

"I was selling, and Ollie was standing back, you know, and watching me, you know, make sure didn't nobody try to rob me or nothing like that," Ross said. "So I would make like three hundred dollars, I would take it home and put it up, because I didn't want to be standing out there with a whole lot of dope and a whole lot of money. Because the police raided the spot all the time, you know. They might be raided every 15 or 20 minutes. It was a PCP street. They was selling PCP there. But they wouldn't pay no attention to me unless I had a lot of money on me." 

Ross said the cops mostly just smelled dealers' hands, looking for the telltale stench of PCP. "They would just smell my hands, pat me and let me go. But if I had a wad of money, it would draw attention, so we never wanted to get over two or three hundred dollars." 

Acquaintances who were dealing PCP—"slanging Sherm" or "selling water," as it was called—made fun of him for selling coke because there was a much bigger market for angel dust. "All the guys selling PCP used to tell us, 'Ya'll can make more money, ya'll should sell PCP.' And I was like, 'No, that's all right, I don't want to mess with PCP. That's too hard.' And cocaine was more, like, flyer, more like the uppity people, you know, wasn't nobody going crazy, you know? When they smoked the PCP they would go crazy and stuff and I would think, 'I ain't gonna be involved with that.' Cocaine is like, mellow, and it was cool. So I didn't mind doing it." 

Still slightly unsure of the future of the cocaine business, Ross kept his hand in the auto business as well. He was still stealing cars and fencing them or stripping them down in his body shop and parting them out. On March 19, 1982, he was arrested by the LAPD for grand theft auto. The police found a Mercedes Benz in his garage with parts that didn't match. Ross dipped into his cash reserves and hired a Beverly Hills lawyer named Alan Fenster, a former prosecutor and film studio lawyer who had little trouble getting the auto theft charge tossed out of court. 

"There was no evidence Ricky had any knowledge about that car," said Fenster, whose performance in that felony case would lead him to many years of lucrative employment with Ross. Fenster, who'd been defending drug dealers and drug users since the early 1970s, said it was "my recollection that when I met Rick, he was already dealing drugs. Ricky was introduced to me by another client I had, who was a dealer, and I recall that he told me Ross was someone who was into some serious dealing then." 

Early 1982 was an exceptionally good time to be in the cocaine business. It was like getting in on the ground floor of Amway. "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. . ." 

Though it would not become apparent for some time, the cocaine industry was then undergoing dramatic changes that would boost the fortunes of dealers everywhere. The drug was finally beginning to filter down from the penthouses into the real world, opening up a whole new audience for its seductive charms. 

The most basic reason was supply and demand. In some cities, Miami in particular, supply was beginning to outstrip demand, thanks largely to the efforts of Carlos Lehder and his pals in Medellín, Colombia, who had revolutionized the import/export part of the business. By early 1982, the Medellín cartel had gotten its act together and—using special airplanes, radar avoidance techniques, and specially designed speedboats—began bringing in unheard-of amounts of cocaine, mostly through the Bahamas. 

Ten days before Rick Ross's auto theft arrest in March 1982, Customs agents in Miami searched an airplane, owned by a tiny Colombian air cargo company, that had flown in from Medellín. By the time agents arrived, workers were busy unloading dozens of boxes labeled "jeans." But when an inspector stuck a screwdriver into one of them, he didn't hit denim. White powder came pouring out of the hole. 

When the Customs men had finished weighing the cocaine, the scales topped out at 3,906 pounds, nearly four times the size of the previous U.S. cocaine seizure record. It was, authors Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen wrote in Kings of Cocaine, the DEA's "first look at the shadow of the beast." 

As more loads like that got through, the wholesale price of cocaine in the U.S. began dropping. But it never dropped dramatically enough to make it popular in low income neighborhoods. According to the 1994 Rand Institute study, between 1979 and 1982 ounce prices in L.A. fell from the stratospheric to the merely exorbitant: $4,844 vs. $4,011. Gram prices fell slightly during the same period, from $321 to $259. Kilo prices dropped more significantly, from around $75,000 to around $60,000. Major importers and top-level dealers began seeing big price breaks. But if the Rand study's figures are accurate, for the average Joe who bought by the gram, cocaine was still extremely expensive. 

And that was okay with Ricky Ross and Ollie Newell. At those prices, they didn't need a lot of customers. By the end of 1981, they were finally starting to make some real money. The number of users in the neighborhoods wasn't growing that much, but they were stealing customers away from other dealers. "We just had a price," Ross said. "Nobody in the neighborhood could touch us."

The cocaine they were getting from Fisher was slightly cheaper than what others were paying, and when Ross asked him why, Fisher told him he "had a really good connection." Since Ross could charge less, it wasn't too hard to find customers willing to pay $125 a gram instead of the $150 or $200 they'd been paying. Any chance to save a buck—especially after being gouged all these years —made for very happy and loyal clients. "People would come from everywhere, man. They would come from Pomona, Pasadena, Riverside, Long Beach. It wasn't just like an L.A. thing." 

Ross also exercised some of the same type of discipline that had kept him out on the tennis courts, swinging the racquet and running, hour after hour, day after day. "I mean, listen, when you got in the dope business, everybody wanted to get high. Nobody wanted to sell dope," Ross said disgustedly. "It was like. . .even Ollie! Ollie was, was, was straight and always wanted to get high, get high, get high. So. . .I finally got in it, I said, 'Well, man, you're using up all the profit!' This was in the early stages, and he said, 'Well, I ain't gonna do no more.' But everybody else wanted to get high. [It was] the whole motto, you know, in our neighborhood—because we never left our neighborhood; we was like confined to South Central L.A.—everybody was just getting high. Let's party, man." 

Ross was not the party-hearty type, not when it came to business. He considered himself first and foremost to be a professional cocaine trafficker. It was his job to move dope, and he did it with his usual intensity. "You know how some people feel that God put them down here to be a preacher? I felt that he had put me down to be the cocaine man," Ross told the L.A. Times in 1994. And like a missionary for a new religion, Ross began creating cocaine dealers. 

"Eventually, all the guys that was selling PCP started seeing everybody coming [to me] with their hundred dollars, and they were selling like ten dollars worth, five dollars worth, you know, sticks. They knew every time somebody came to me, it was a hundred dollars. So I didn't have to see that many people, maybe, fifteen people a day, you know, I make fifteen hundred dollars and they started seeing to that and knowing how much money I was making. 

"So then they started saying, 'Well, I'm gonna sell some water and you know I'm going to buy two hundred dollars worth from Rick and start, you know, investing it in cocaine and start doing it myself. So the next thing I know, all these guys were coming to me saying, 'Man, I want to get an eight-track.'" 

But Ross's source, Mr. Fisher, was getting antsy about all the cocaine Ross and Newell were ordering. An occasional gram here and there was fine, he told Ross, but he was a schoolteacher, not Super Fly. The only reason he did a little dealing out the side was to pay for his own supply. Rick and Ollie were making a business out of it, and if they wanted to do that it was their business, but he didn't want anything to do with it. 

"I think he was getting tired of us calling him up all the time and having him get us some more," Ross said. "Mr. Fisher was working so he told me to go ahead and deal directly with Ivan and we met at Mr. Fisher's house and I got the stuff." 

"Ivan," a handsome, smiling Latino, had been supplying Mr. Fisher with cocaine for about a year. Ross had seen him around Fisher's house before, but they'd never been introduced. 

During their first meeting, Ivan brought along another Hispanic—Henry—but Ricky wasn't clear what part Henry played, other than that he was Ivan's brother-in-law. Maybe he was his partner. Or maybe he'd just come along for the ride. 

In halting English, Ivan told them that he would be happy to be their supplier from now on. If they wanted any more product, they should call him directly, instead of bothering Mr. Fisher. He slipped Ross a folded paper with a phone number on it. On the way out, Ivan told Ross that he would get them a better price than Mr. Fisher had. "We moved up fast," Ross said. "We went from moving grams to moving ounces." And Ivan proved true to his word. "After I started dealing directly with Ivan, it got better. We could take. . .the same thing we was buying from Mr. Fisher for $200 and turn it into $900, because we found out Mr. Fisher had been taking some of the money. He might have been making like $50, $75 off each one [8-track]. So we started making more money." 

With more cash flow, Ross was able to order larger amounts of cocaine from Ivan and get a better price, a volume purchase break. And then he could cut his street prices even further. "He kept incrementally expanding his quantity, and every time he could do that, he was bringing the price down just a little bit more, and then what he would gain from volume, he would put right back into the operation," Times reporter Katz said. "It was just classic economics. And he saw all this in a way I guess others didn't, or weren't as disciplined as him to act on." 

Some of this discipline was not entirely of Ross's choosing. One reason he and Newell began reinvesting their profits so faithfully was because they didn't dare spend the money on anything else. "My momma was strict, right? Both our mothers, me and Ollie's mother, was strict, right? So we couldn't show the money! We had like. . .we had $1,000 and we didn't even buy new tennis shoes! Because my mother woulda knew: 'Where'd you get them shoes from?' 

"So we, like, hid our money. We was hiding our money from our mothers!" Ross laughed, shaking his head at the idea of two badass cocaine dealers so afraid of their mommas they couldn't spend their loot. "So even if we buy clothes, we'd hide them in the garage and put them on after we'd leave so she wouldn't find out." 

But the nature of his business made it difficult to hide forever. Eventually Annie Ross figured out what was going on. 

"When she found out I was selling dope, she had a fit. Threw me out of the house," Ross said. "I never rented no apartment or nothing like that. I had some money but I didn't know how to rent an apartment. I was living in her garage. I fixed it up like a little house. She was like, 'Boy, something going on. I don't know what you're doing but you ain't doing something right. You got all these people coming around here. Tell them people to stop coming round my house,'" Ross said. 

He "really didn't do business there," he said, but when a customer wanted something, someone had to come by and let him know. "And she was like, 'There's too many people coming over here, I know something is wrong.' One day she just said, 'Get your stuff and leave. Don't come back over here. And Ollie, don't you come back either.' Because you know Ollie is like her godson. So she threw us out. But I had a little bit of money then and I moved in with one of my cousins and started paying her to let me stay there. 

"But that's basically how we got started." After eight months with their new supplier, just as their business really began expanding, "something happened to Ivan," Ross said. He'd disappeared. Ross and Newell panicked. Their only supplier had dropped off the face of the earth. Where were they going to get their cocaine now? From afar, Danilo Blandón watched events unfold. It was time for him to make his move.

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