Part 12: Dark Alliance..."I Could go Anywhere in the World and Sell Dope"..."They can't touch Us"

Dark Alliance...The CIA,The Contra's and The Crack Cocaine Explosion
By Gary Webb 
21 

"I Could go Anywhere in the 

World and Sell Dope" 

Ricky Ross moved as far away from Los Angeles as he could get, taking Mary Bronner and their children to Cincinnati, Ohio. It was where Bronner grew up; Ross had accompanied her home once as she attempted to kick her crack habit, and he had taken to the tidy conservative midwestern city on the banks of the Ohio River. The neighborhoods were green and quiet, lined with big leafy trees. The homes were spacious, set on seemingly endless yards, not stacked on top of each other like the dusty matchboxes in Los Angeles. 

"It was real cool," Ross said. He would use his time in Cincinnati "to back away from the game, just mellow out. I thought I'd get away from it, you know." Though most of his assets were tied up in L.A. real estate, he'd taken $300,000 in cash with him. In a city where a palatial home could be had for a third of that, it was plenty of money. His businesses and rental properties in L.A. were still producing revenue. "Financially," Ross said, "I was set." 

He moved to a townhouse on the east side of Hamilton County, in a comfortable Republican suburb of rolling hills and minivans. "We was trying to get away from drug life—her using and me dealing," Ross explained. "Basically, I just wanted to be a small-time person, you know, with a nice house, with a nice car. I wanted kids. I wanted my kids to play tennis. I wanted my kids to win Wimbledon. I wanted them to go to college." 

But Ross had never been able to sit back and take things easy. He had to be in motion, working some kind of deal, so he indulged himself in his other great obsession: real estate. He liked to refer to himself half-jokingly as a property junkie. "I was buying property, old houses, rebuilding them. . .I had become pretty knowledgeable on how to rebuild houses." It was undramatic but satisfying work, and gradually L.A. began to seem farther than 2,400 miles away. Ricky Ross was twenty-seven years old, and as the weeks stretched into months he began to feel at ease. Years later he would look back on that period wistfully. "Look at myself now and say, 'Man, you had it made.'" 

He would get occasional calls from Danilo in Miami, and they'd catch up. "We stayed on a relationship. You know, we talked and he was still dealing with Ollie. He didn't quit. When I quit, Ollie didn't stop." But Ross said the Nicaraguan didn't like dealing with Newell, whom he referred to as "Big Charlie." 

"Basically, he would tell me: 'Why'd you quit? I need you. You know Big Charlie don't take care of the business like you do. . .. He was saying, basically, that Charlie didn't pay him like he was supposed to and, you know, he was slow, stuff like that. He said that I took care of my business the way I was supposed to, and I did what I told him I was going to do." 

Blandón denied he was personally selling drugs at that time but admitted that he was overseeing the drug sales of his successors. "I knew everything," he said. Because of the way the cocaine business worked, he'd had to vouch for Roger Sandino and Jose Gonzalez, and that meant mediating the disputes and solving the problems that arose between Ross's crew, the Nicaraguans, and their Colombian suppliers. 

Blandón agreed that Ross's replacements "weren't taking care of the business" and said there were frequent feuds with Meneses men. "They were calling me all the time. 'Hey, the order didn't come with the money. The order didn't come with the merchandise,' So that's the relationship I had." 

But most of his time and attention, Blandón said, was devoted to what he called his "legitimate businesses." After he got to Miami, Blandón invested his L.A. drug profits in a string of companies, sometimes in partnership with an exiled Nicaraguan judge, Jose Macario Estrada, a family friend who was also Blandón's immigration lawyer. Like Blandón, Macario was deeply involved with the FDN and its Miami support network, working with the Contras to arrange travel papers and work permits for rebel soldiers and their families. He also helped to create a number of nonprofit foundations in Miami that supported the Contra cause. 

"I was with the FDN here in Miami, working in Miami since 1980," Macario confirmed in an interview with the author. Before the revolution, acquaintances said, he'd worked at the U.S. embassy in Managua, helping out in the cultural attaches office. "We always joked that he was working for the CIA," said one. Macario denied it, but it's easy to see why others might have gotten that impression. He had CIA agents for friends. In fact, they'd saved his life in 1979. 

"A squad of Sandinista revolutionaries came to pass me by the arms, you know? Came to, what do you call it, eliminate me in a summary proceedings." The next day he decided to seek asylum in the embassy of Colombia, which, as it turned out, was located in the home of Macario's friend, attorney Carlos Icaza. A son-in-law of General Edmundo Meneses, Icaza was the personal attorney of Adolfo Calero, who had been a CIA agent before the 1979 revolution and would become the Contras' political leader. Icaza shielded Macario from the Sandinistas for a time, and Macario escaped the country seven months after the revolution on the last day of February 1980. "I have the anniversary of my escape once every four years," he joked. 

Macario's protector, Carlos Icaza, was publicly accused by the Sandinistas of being a CIA agent in 1983, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was charged with being a central conspirator in a foiled CIA plot to poison Nicaragua's foreign minister with a bottle of thallium-laced Benedictine liqueur. Icaza fled Nicaragua and went to work for the FDN in Honduras, as did his wife. Later he became an attorney for Norwin Meneses (among other things, he arranged the sale of a Salvador Dali painting Norwin owned) and served as corporate lawyer for Norwin's suspected money launderer, economist Orlando Murillo. 

In late 1986 Jose Macario was appointed to a blue-ribbon commission by the FDN to look into newspaper allegations that the Contras were squandering U.S. humanitarian aid money. Another member of that FDN panel was accountant Rene Gonzalez of the Peat Marwick & Mitchell office in Caracas, Venezuela. 

After exonerating the FDN, both men became business partners with Danilo Blandón in a company called Mex-US Import and Export Inc. Other directors of that company included Blandón's Mexican college friend and convicted money launderer Sergio Guerra and a Panamanian banker, Jose Fernando Soto, the longtime representative of the Swiss Bank Corp. in Panama and an old friend of Chepita's uncle, Orlando Murillo. Blandón also bought his wife a business: Pupi's Children's Boutique, which Chepita ran from a shopping mall in Sweetwater. And he bought into a Nicaraguan restaurant in Miami called La Parrilla. 

La Parrilla had been started by Anastasio Somoza's former counterinsurgency expert, Major General Gustavo Medina, and Miami businessman Donald Barrios, the FDN supporter who'd sent Blandón to fetch Norwin Meneses from LAX six or seven years earlier in 1980 or 1981. Ricky Ross's former cocaine supplier, Henry Corrales, also owned a piece of the action, court records show. The elegant restaurant became a hangout for Contra leaders and was the site of pro-Contra demonstrations and seminars. The Miami Herald lightheartedly described the cuisine as "Contra cooking from ex-Somoza General Gustavo Medina." Another story noted that "despite the proximity of Fontainebleau Park, the apartment complex that so reminds Nicaraguans of the Open Tres apartments in their native Managua, La Parrilla customers are primarily Cuban." 

"The Cubans, our compatriots in exile, also are very fond of Nicaraguan food," General Medina explained. Blandón's restaurant was also a big hit with the food critics. "The steak melts in your mouth," twittered one Miami Herald reviewer. "Service is akin to the poshest French restaurant." In 1987 the Herald named it "the best Nicaraguan restaurant in Dade [County]" and awarded it four stars, the paper's highest rating. 

But the cocaine lord's main investment was in Alpha II Rent-a-Car, which began with an office outside the Miami International Airport and spread to twenty-four other locations in southern Florida. Blandón's rent-a-car business was so successful, court records show, he became an authorized outlet for Chrysler Corporation and General Motors vehicles. 

Ross said he visited Blandón in Miami several times in mid-1987 and was treated like visiting royalty; Blandón provided him with free rental cars and complimentary hotel rooms. Meanwhile, Ross turned Blandón's daughters onto rap music, bringing them the latest CDs and amazing them with stories about the rappers he'd known and bankrolled from his neighborhood. "Danilo took me around and introduced me to his friends, like he was showing me off. I was probably the only black guy any of them had ever met," he said. Several times, Ross said, Blandón dropped hints that he'd like to do some business with him. 

"He kept saying he could get me some stuff for really cheap and we could make a lot of money with it in Cincinnati." Ross knew Danilo was right. He'd checked around town and had been amazed at how much folks in Ohio were paying for their dope. "I got down there and started meeting people and they were telling me, 'Aw, man, it's this and it's that.' Then my friend from Miami came by and said, 'Hey, man, come on, I'll give it for you for ten.' So he was talking about giving it to me for $10,000 and in Cincinnati, keys was selling for $50,000!" Ross laughed. "Ounces were like $2,400. It was like when I first started." 

When Blandón called him from Detroit one day in the fall of 1987 and asked him to come up for a meeting, Ross said he knew what his old friend had in mind. And, just as surely, he knew that he would get in his car and make the four-hour trip north. It wasn't just because Danilo was asking, though Ross said his relationship with the Nicaraguan was such that he would have done almost anything for him. The real reason, Ross knew, was that he missed cocaine trafficking. He was good at it; it was in every fiber of his being.

"The business," as Danilo called it, had been custom-made for him. It was his calling. God, Ross firmly believed, had put him on earth to be the Cocaine Man. When he wasn't dealing, he was just like anybody else, maybe worse—an illiterate high-school dropout. A zero. But give him a pager and some dope, and he was a virtuoso. There weren't too many people in this world who could dance through a minefield of cops and snitches juggling multimillion-dollar drug deals and emerge unscratched. 

"It got to the point where I enjoyed selling drugs so much that I could be in bed with my woman and, if the right person paged me, I'd get up," Ross told the Los Angeles Times. So when Danilo offered him fifteen kilos and a good price, Ross said, "I told him to bring them to me. I'll take them." He was back in play. 

Making Cincinnati his own was effortless. By then, Ross was an old hand at creating new crack markets. "I knew the recipe. It's just like it was in L.A. If you want to get in with the blacks, you find out who the shot-caller is. And you talk to him and you get him on your side. If he gives you permission, you can go to his neighborhood and talk to his guys. So that's what I did in Lincoln Heights," Ross later told a Cincinnati reporter. 

From there, he branched out to Over-the-Rhine, another poor inner-city neighborhood, and then took his show to the suburbs: Avondale, Mt. Airy, Bond Hill, St. Bernard, Lockland, and Walnut Hills, using the same marketing gimmicks he'd perfected in L.A.—free cocaine, smoke parties, volume discounts. Once those operations were up and running, Ross called back to L.A. and invited his friends to come out and staff them. 

"The recruits were given apartments, beepers, cocaine, and instructions on how to conduct street sales by using phone booths, pagers, and mopeds. The drugs were stored in the trunks of parked ears placed around the neighborhoods," the Justice Department's Inspector General reported. "Most of these people were members of gangs, most notably the Crips." 

Suddenly, Cincinnati had two problems it never had before: Crips and crack. 

"In 1987, we had lots of crack in the east and west but not in Cincinnati until Ricky Ross came here. There's no doubt in my mind crack in Cincinnati can be traced to Ross," said Sharonville, Ohio, police specialist Robert Enoch. 

But Ross didn't limit himself to the Queen City. He began "going out of town," and the story was the same wherever he went. With Blandón's cocaine prices, he could blow the locals out of the water. So he did. His dope was turning up in the hands of crack dealers in Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Hamilton, Middle-town, and Fairfield, Ohio, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Texas. Even in faraway Seattle, police officers viewed Ross' drug ring as "the single most important group distributing crack cocaine in the Seattle-Tacoma area." 

"That was a guy who could sell Popsicles to an Eskimo," said San Fernando Police lieutenant Ernest I Falcon, a veteran undercover detective. "You want to say he's a low-life, no-good piece of crap. But you got to respect some of these guys for their ambition and cunning. You got to give the devil his due." 

"I could go anywhere in the world and sell dope," Ross said. "I just need one person in a city." 

Mike Horton, a police officer assigned to a DEA task force in Ohio, said Ross became known as the "10-million-dollar man" in Cincinnati because of the money he was supposedly making. 

Ross said he made nowhere near that much. In ten months, he said, he sold 300 or 400 kilos of Blandón's cocaine in the Midwest, netting around $2 million in profits. He flew to Miami once a month to drop off cash. "Either we met there, or we met in New York. I think we might have met in Atlanta one time too," he said. He said he met with Blandón and a Colombian named Tony in New York City several times to place orders for cocaine. 

Blandón confirmed that, and said he and Roger Sandino visited Ross in Cincinnati. Ross also wired money to Florida in Chepita's name, Blandón said, but claimed it was paid to Sandino "because Roger Sandino was my partner in the business." 

At other times, Ross said, his friends in L.A. would just stick the dope on a bus and let Greyhound do the driving. And that was how Cincinnati authorities finally discovered who was bringing all that crack into their city. 

In September 1988 an eastbound Greyhound eased into a station in New Mexico, and a state policeman walked by the silver behemoth with a drug sniffing dog. The canine got near the luggage compartment and went crazy. Inside, the officer found a suitcase carrying nine kilos of cocaine, worth around $100,000. The luggage tag said the bag was bound for Cincinnati. A call was placed to the Cincinnati DEA, asking for advice. Let it come through, the DEA said. We'll stake out the bus station and see who shows up. 

A few days later one of Ross's employees, a young L.A. Crip named Alphonso Jeffries, ambled into the bus depot and claimed the suitcase, springing the DEA's trap. 

Ross got the news and quickly assessed the damage. Nine kilos was enough to put Alphonso Jeffries away for a couple decades or more. The pressure would be on him to roll over and give up someone else, and if the dominos started falling, they would form a straight line to Freeway Rick. Ross contacted Jeffries and told him all his legal bills would be paid and he'd have the best lawyers in town, as long as he kept his mouth shut. Jeffries told him he would. 

But it didn't matter. The mere fact that a Crip had been caught in Cincinnati with cocaine "led to the FBI and DEA field offices in Cincinnati to investigate allegations that the Crips. . .were flooding the Cincinnati market with inexpensive, high quality cocaine," the Justice Department reported. The feds were on the hunt and Ross knew it was only a matter of time. 

Then, as if he didn't have enough problems, Ross discovered that one his underlings was screwing his girlfriend. That clinched it; he was getting fucked every which way in Cincinnati. It was time to go home. 

"I'd been gone a little over a year, so I felt that everything had died down and people had forgot about me," he said. "I sold what I had and I quit." 

When he got back to L.A. in the fall of 1988, he wanted nothing to do with cocaine. He was too worried about Alphonso Jeffries, whose steadfast silence on Rick's behalf had been rewarded with a twenty-year prison sentence. That was straight federal time. No parole. For all Ross knew, Jeffries had already rolled over on him. Ross went into the home improvement business, buying specialized equipment to spray acoustic ceilings, painting, and waiting to see if the other shoe would drop. 

"I guess about a month after I got back in L.A. he [Blandón] started calling me again and asking me what was the matter, why I'd stopped, and that Charlie and him wasn't doing what they were supposed to be doing." Ross said he told Blandón to forget it. He wasn't getting anywhere near dope. "I had enough money. . .I was working and I was just able to resist him." 

Blandón called two or three times a month, Ross said, until the word got out that Ross was under investigation. A grand jury in Smith County, Texas, returned an indictment charging Ross with cocaine conspiracy. He had called his cousins, the Mauldin's, in Texas in May 1988 and discussed a cocaine deal with them on a monitored line. A fugitive warrant was issued. 

"About three months after I was in L.A., they did a program on CBS that was talking about me, that I was under investigation in Cincinnati and also in Texas," he said. "After the CBS program showed, [Danilo] stopped calling me." 

A lot of people stopped calling after that. Ricky Ross was starting to smell like dead meat. As Ross had feared, Alphonso Jeffries had broken. He told the police about Ross's trips to New York City and California to pick up cocaine in the fall of 1988. They'd brought twenty kilos back from New York the first time, he said, and ten kilos the second. DEA agents found travel records and motel receipts that confirmed Jeffries's statements, and they found Ross's fingerprints on several incriminating documents. 

In June 1989, Ross and thirteen other people were indicted on federal charges of cocaine conspiracy in Cincinnati, and another fugitive warrant was issued. Now he had the state of Texas and the U.S. government after him. Ross melted into South Central and kept his head clown, staying busy with his construction work. Months went by, and he heard nothing. One afternoon in late November, he was pouring concrete at an apartment building when an unmarked police car came screeching up.

"One of the guys says, 'That was the narcs.' And so when he said it was the narcs, I ran, and when I ran they started shooting at me. I think they shot about twelve times at me." Bullets zipping by, Ross scampered down East Coldon Avenue, found an unlocked house, and barricaded himself inside, retreating to a bedroom closet. In the darkness, Ross pulled out a cell phone and frantically tried to call his lawyer, Alan Fenster, while the police yelled at him to come out. A two-man SWAT team arrived with a dog and approached the house cautiously. 

"They told me to come out," Ross said, "and the next thing I knew they kicked the door in. They came in with a dog. The dog came to the closet and he alerted that I was in the closet." 

The police pulled open the door, and Ross found himself staring into the glare of several flashlights. He was told to come out with his hands in front of him and to get down on his knees, which he did. He was handcuffed, and "then all of a sudden the dog just about went crazy. He started biting—he started biting me all up in between my legs, on my butt cheeks and he—he did it so long that I couldn't take the pain no more, so I kicked him." 

All the pent-up rage and frustration that the Los Angeles police had saved up for Freeway Rick erupted in the next instant. 

"They started hitting me in the head with flashlights, and one of them broke his flashlight on the top of my head right here. And after he did that he went in the kitchen and got a big frying pan—I think it was a 15-pound frying pan, he said in court—and he clubbed me over the head with that. And then he was kicking me all over my back and in my stomach. I had boot marks all over me, all over my body." Ross was taken to a hospital and charged with assault on a police officer. The police claimed Ross had attacked them with a frying pan, so, naturally, they'd had to subdue him. 

Bruised, sore, and swollen, the former crack king of L.A. was unceremoniously dumped into a cell at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Correctional Center to await extradition to Cincinnati. In all his life, things had never seemed more hopeless. Politically, the timing of his capture couldn't have been worse. In the past year, the police and the media had finally discovered the connection between the L.A. gangs and the spread of crack and automatic weapons to cities and towns across America. Newspapers, magazines, and TV shows were filled with stories about L.A. gangbangers showing up in small-town USA, packing Uzis and terrorizing the locals. 

"Los Angeles drug gangs are spreading cocaine and violence in cities nationwide and may become a new form of organized crime unless they are stopped soon," worried a July 1988 Associated Press story that appeared in many newspapers around the country. 'Authorities say members of two prominent rival drug gangs from Los Angeles, the Crips and the Bloods, have infiltrated cities from Alaska to Washington, D.C." 

During the 1988 presidential campaign Washington had gone on an antidrug crusade, in many ways more extreme than the one in 1986, because now there were some facts to back up the fear. Congressional hearings had unearthed the links between crack profits and the proliferation of assault rifles in the inner cities. Government studies had been done, showing that L.A. had indisputably become the main source of the nation's crack contagion, a giant chancre oozing death and violence. "Los Angeles has become the transshipment area for this problem," testified assistant L.A. County sheriff Jerry Harper. "We are being contacted regularly by officers from Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Louisiana, Florida, Hawaii and all with regard to gang members, Crips and Bloods, and so forth, who have emanated from Los Angeles and are transporting their drugs to other states across the nation." 

Los Angeles U.S. attorney Robert Bonner told Congress that "these emerging modern-day gangsters have set up raw cocaine distribution outlets in cities across the country. I can assure you and members of this committee that if these gangs are allowed to become entrenched in the drug distribution business on a nationwide basis, which is the direction they are headed, in the coming few years we will find ourselves with an organized crime problem that will put the Mafia to shame." 

Alarmed by such reports, Congress passed a whole new set of anti-crack laws that, among other things, made even first-time offenders like Ross eligible for a mandatory ten-year sentence, no parole. 

Ross knew there was a good chance they would nail him to the wall in Cincinnati, a city that had sent Larry Flynt to jail just for selling dirty magazines. If anyone ranked lower than a pornographer, it was someone like Ricky Ross. He epitomized everything that decent, upright midwesterners had come to hate and fear about the 1980s—a black crack kingpin bringing all his Crip friends in from the Left Coast to pollute their city with drugs and gangs. They knew how to deal with people like him. 

And if, by some miracle, he managed to beat the federal rap, he had the folks in Texas waiting to get their hooks into him, with their hundred-year prison sentences and well-known love of black drug dealers. Try as he might, he could see no way out. He wasn't dealing with the goons from the Freeway Rick Task Force this time. These federal agents weren't going to do anything stupid. Barring some divine intervention, he was finished. 

Ross passed several gloomy months awaiting extradition in the L.A. prison, growing more disconsolate with each passing day. His friends gradually quit coming to sec him. His properties began going into foreclosure. Everything he'd worked for was crumbling away. 

Then the people from the U.S. Department of Justice came calling, and by the time they left, he could barely stop smiling. God, it seemed, had not forsaken the Cocaine Man after all.

401S

22

"They can't touch Us" 

When Ross was led from his cell at the MCC to meet the representatives of the Justice Department, his thoughts had been with Danilo Blandón. The feds, Ross assumed, wanted his source. It was what the task force had been after when they came to see him the last time he'd been locked up. That was the way things worked. You got busted, and they came to you with The Choice: be a rat or be a jailbird. 

He'd managed to duck the situation the last time, but he wouldn't have that luxury again. The feds had him by the balls. Now, it appeared, he would be forced to confront the question he'd always dreaded: Could he rat out Danilo? "He was Danilo, you know? He was, he was like my God, my number one person," Ross said. "Hadn't many people been there for me, you know, when I was coming up. So Danilo was somebody that I felt had always been in my corner and he always showed like he cared about me." 

But to Ross's surprise and relief, the federal people had no interest in the Nicaraguan. "They didn't ask me nothing about who I was getting it from," Ross said. All the justice Department wanted to hear about were his experiences with the detectives on the Freeway Rick Task Force. They'd been reading those complaints he and his friends had filed against the officers. Were they true? And would he be willing to testify to it? 

Ross was dumbfounded. He'd been willing to testify two years ago, but nobody had wanted to hear about it then. Besides, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division had already looked into his complaints and dismissed them for lack of evidence, or so he'd been told. Yet now they wanted to know if he would be a U.S. government witness against the police. A drug dealer helping to put narcs in jail? If that didn't beat all.

Ross had one question: What was in it for him? It could change the way certain people felt about him, he was told. If he cooperated and testified truthfully and honestly, it would help when he appeared before the judge in Ohio for sentencing. Plus, the government might decide not to seize his properties or his remaining cash under the asset forfeiture laws. And there was the added attraction of getting back at the cops who had harassed him and his family. 

To the Justice Department, Ricky Ross was no longer a dope peddler. He had become "a percipient witness in a case involving allegations of serious misconduct" by members of the Majors and the Freeway Rick Task Force. An FBI sting called "Operation Big Spender" was behind Ross's newfound credibility with the federal government. "This may be a terrible thing to say," said L.A. County sheriff Sherman Block, "but as we got into this thing, it became obvious that the stories being told by the crooks were more credible than the stories told by our officers." 

In the fall of 1989, after Block received anonymous complaints that the Majors were ripping off drug dealers, the FBI sent an undercover agent into the Majors' territory posing as a courier for a money launderer. The Majors were tipped off that he was carrying a load of cash, which could be found in his room at the Warner Center Marriott in Woodland Hills. The FBI had reserved three adjoining rooms at the hotel. The "courier" was in the middle. On one side were agents manning video and audio gear; on the other, a SWAT team. 

It was like dangling a pork chop in front of a dog. Seizing cash had become the Majors' specialty by the end of the 1980s. They were no longer real narcotics detectives anymore. Thanks to expanded asset forfeiture laws, the Majors had become sin-tax collectors for Sheriff Block and L.A. County. 

In 1988 alone, the sheriff's office hauled in an astonishing $33.9 million in cash, and another $33 million the following year—along with 66 houses, 110 vehicles, 4 airplanes, and 2 businesses. Of the $33 million seized in 1988, the Majors had brought in $13.6 million of it all by themselves, along with 4,470 pounds of cocaine. 

The lion's share of that booty had been produced by the Majors II crew, which was now under the command of Sergeant Robert Sobel—" El Diablo." After the Freeway Rick Task Force disbanded in late 1987, Sobel was handpicked to lead Majors II, and he had driven his squad to Olympian heights. "My men are all trained to tear flesh when they scent blood!" Sobel had bragged in an interdepartmental newsletter. 

The Majors zeroed in on the FBI's "courier" so fast they had a surveillance team in place before the FBI agents arrived at the hotel. The detectives quickly learned that the "courier" had reserved the rooms on either side of him and got suspicious, wondering if they were being led into some trap. Worried that the deputies would bust into the other rooms and expose the sting, an FBI agent cautiously approached Sobel's crew and told them they'd done their jobs too well. They had stumbled on a federal undercover operation and were about to expose it (which was technically the truth). Would they be so kind as to leave the area? 

Two weeks later, the FBI tried again, this time renting a room at the Valley Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks. Again the Majors snapped at the bait. A hidden video camera was rolling as two plainclothes officers burst into the courier's room and found $480,000 in a garment bag. "'Ohhhhh ho ho!" one deputy exclaimed as she pulled the bag from under the bed and opened it. "Is this your bag?" 

The deputies skimmed $48,000 of the marked cash, stuffed it into a gym bag, and left. Sobel and other deputies then entered the room and questioned the undercover FBI agent, Indalecio Guzman, about the money. After the agent claimed no knowledge of where the cash came from, one deputy persuaded him to sign a form disclaiming ownership of the remaining money. "You can say room service left it," Sobel joked. 

In a series of lightning raids that night, the authorities found some of the marked cash in the homes and cars of the deputies. Sheriff Block immediately suspended nine members of the squad. 

Within forty-eight hours, distraught and appearing heavily medicated, "El Diablo" Sobel approached the feds and volunteered to testify against his crew. He admitted that much of what Ross and his partners had accused them of was true: the task force had routinely beaten suspects, a practice known as giving someone a "tune-up"; planted dope, called "flaking" a suspect; lied in court; falsified search warrant affidavits; and stolen drug money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—by turning in only a portion of what they had seized. 

With their ill-gotten gains, the Majors had gone on spending sprees, buying vacation homes on the Colorado River, big-screen TVs, jewelry, fancy cars, boats, helicopter lessons, and Hawaiian vacations. The FBI discovered that LAPD detective Polak had liposuction performed on his buttocks, and his wife had paid cash for a breast enlargement operation. The agents were told of Dom Perignon-drenched parties; officers were dabbling in stocks and bonds and starting side businesses. Remarkably; considering their line of work, the detectives had left a paper trail of their excesses a mile long. 

On February 22, 1990, a federal grand jury indicted ten deputies on twentyseven counts of theft, income tax evasion, and conspiracy. And prosecutors promised they were just getting started. There were more indictments to come. 

One of the first to be charged was Deputy Daniel Garner, a hard-nosed detective who had been one of the spiritual leaders of Majors II. Garner decided that if he was going down, he was going down fighting. He hired one of L.A.'s most high-profile criminal lawyers, Harland W. Braun, who had defended Lee Marvin in his famous "palimony" suit and would later successfully represent one of the officers in the Rodney King beating case. 

"Dan Garner came in my office and told me that there was nothing the feds were going to be able to do to them because he had proof that they were dealing in drugs and laundering drug money," Braun recalled in an interview. "He said, 'They can't touch us.' And he gave me these papers he said they had seized in a drug raid several years earlier." They were some of the documents the Majors had taken from Ronald Lister's house in 1986, which Garner had secreted away as "insurance." Though Braun privately doubted the records would have the impact Garner expected, he agreed they could be a useful bargaining chip down the road. Certainly, the Majors had little else to pin their hopes on. While the FBI had an incriminating videotape, marked cash, and tape recordings Sobel had secretly made of the deputies plotting their defense at a bar, all the detectives had were some lame stories about hitting jackpots in Las Vegas and loans from relatives. 

Garner and his co-defendants went on trial in October 1990, and the federal prosecutors led off their case by playing the devastating videotape for the jurors, who became noticeably upset at the sight of police officers helping themselves to bundles of suspected drug money and then joking about it. Braun decided it was time to spring the Lister papers on the government. While he was cross examining one of the FBI agents who had participated in the Big Spender sting, he casually asked if the agent knew anything about seized drug money being laundered by the federal government and then diverted to the Contras by the CIA. Federal prosecutors leaped to their feet to object, and Braun let the question hang for a bit before moving on to another topic. 

After court, Braun walked out onto the steps of the federal building in downtown Los Angeles and held his usual post-trial spin session with the reporters covering the case. One scribe asked about the strange question he'd put to the FBI agent about the Contras and the CIA. Braun calmly replied that he was laying the groundwork for his client's defense: outrageous government conduct. Deputy Garner, Braun pointed out, was a court-certified expert in money-laundering issues, and Garner would explain how some of the cash they were accused of stealing from drug dealers had been laundered by the CIA and used to buy arms for the Contras and other covert operations. 

Braun's startling claims were mentioned in the seventeenth paragraph of the L.A. Times's trial story the next day, but the Justice Department reacted as if he'd written them in the sky while riding a broom. Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Hagemann ran to Judge Edward Rafeedie and demanded a gag order against all of the defense attorneys in the case, complaining that they had "publicized matters that are likely to seriously impair the right of the defendants, the government and the public to a fair trial." He singled out Braun in particular, reporting his accusations that "the government laundered drug profits which were diverted by the CIA to the Nicaraguan Contras and Iran."

Braun responded with an inflammatory motion opposing the gag order, in which he exposed the long-hidden details of the Majors' 1986 raid on Ronald Lister's house. Lister, who wasn't identified by name, was referred to as "a money launderer who [Majors II] knew was associated with a major drug and money laundering ring connected to the Contras in Nicaragua." 

Braun told of Lister's claim of CIA connections and the strange items the deputies had hauled from his house: "Films of military operations in Central America, technical manuals, information on assorted military hardware and communications and numerous documents indicating that drug money was being used to purchase military equipment for Central America. The officers also discovered blown-up pictures of the suspect in Central America with the Contras showing military equipment and military bases. The suspect also was discovered to have maintained a 'way-station' for Nicaraguan transients in Laguna Niguel, California. Officers also pieced together the fact that this suspect was also working with the Blandón family which was importing narcotics from Central America into the United States." 

Braun's motion linked "the Blandón family" to the crash of Eugene Hasenfus C-123K cargo plane in Nicaragua in October 1986, the same crash Scott Weekly claimed on tape that he'd been "tied into." It also told of the Lister files disappearing as "federal agents swooped down on the sheriff's headquarters and removed all the recovered property. Mysteriously all records of the search, seizure and property also 'disappeared' from the Sheriff's Department." 

Garner, Braun wrote, had secretly made copies of "10 pages of the documents seized from the CIA operative," which he said "give the name of CIA operatives in Iran, specifically mention the Contras, list various weaponry that was being purchased and even diagram the route of drug money out of the United States, back into the United States purchasing weaponry for the Contras as well as naming the State Department as one of the agencies involved." 

Braun said he'd asked the justice Department to provide a letter "stating explicitly that no drug money was used by the United States government or any United States government agency to purchase weapons for the Contras or weapons to be traded for hostages from Iran" but it had refused to do so, which Braun interpreted as "a tacit admission" that Garner's claims were true. "The court will note that nowhere in the declaration by the United States attorney does he state that this allegation is false. From this counsel concludes that in fact the government concedes the truth of the statement and only attempts to again suppress it so the public will not know about these illegal activities," Braun wrote. "The government obviously fears the exposure of its drug financed Central American operations." 

The seven deputies on trial, Braun noted, weren't the ones complaining about unfair publicity, even though they had been pilloried in the media by federal prosecutors since the day they were indicted. "The only party that complains about the publicity is the very party that was arguably using drug money to buy weapons for the Contras," Braun wrote. 

The next day the Justice Department fired back with a motion of its own. Once again sidestepping the issue of whether Garner's allegations were true or false, prosecutors asked Judge Rafeedie to issue a court order "excluding any questions, testimony, or other evidence relating to any alleged CIA plot to launder drug money to finance Nicaraguan operations or operations in Iran." Those claims, prosecutor Hagemann wrote, were "wholly irrelevant" to the case, and "would be nothing more than a smokescreen to divert the jury's attentions from the issues." Since the raid had occurred in 1986, Hagemann argued, it was "well outside the time frame of any allegations in the indictment. . .there is thus no connection of any kind between this scheme involving the CIA and this case. This evidence would do nothing more than confuse the jury and be a waste of time." 

Judge Rafeedie called the lawyers into his courtroom the next morning and lashed out at Braun, calling him sneaky and unprofessional. The motion he'd filed, Rafeedie stormed, was a "bad faith" effort to get the information out to the public. "Even if everything that you have said in this document is true, it has nothing to do with whether or not your client filed a false income tax return or whether or not he was stealing money and making purchases with the money that was stolen," Rafeedie raged. "That is, what the CIA or the government did has nothing to do with that, so far as I can see. I cannot conceive of any theory under which that evidence would be admissible in the case and therefore, putting this information out in the guise of an opposition to a restraining order simply to ensure that it gets into the public print and perhaps might contaminate this case or create undue prejudice—frankly, I am disappointed in you, Mr. Braun. I do not believe that a lawyer of your ability and skill would ever even consider that this evidence would be admissible." 
(Rafeedie would later display the same sensitivity to suggested CIA links during one of the trials involving the 1985 murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. When defense lawyers tried to introduce evidence alleging CIA and Contra involvement with Mexican drug lords, Rafeedie ruled the information was irrelevant to the murder and refused to allow the jury to hear it.) 

Stunned by Rafeedie's vehemence, Braun tried to reply, but the judge told him to sit down and shut up. "This opposition which you filed is the most clear and convincing evidence that an order—a restraining order—in this case is necessary," Rafeedie told him. "This document manifests a continuing intention to use the media to make statements in the public. . .which violate the American Bar Association model rules of professional conduct and I have, after receiving this, decided that it is appropriate to issue an order in this case, and I intend to do that." 

Braun once again asked to be heard, but Rafeedie told him it didn't matter what he had to say; he was issuing the gag order immediately. The order, he was informed, prevented him from saying anything "that a reasonable person would expect to be disseminated by means of public communication." Any violation would be "viewed as contempt of this court and punished accordingly." It was, Rafeedie noted, only the second time in his twenty-one years on the bench that he'd had to gag an attorney. 

Finally Braun was permitted to speak. He asked Rafeedie to give him some time and some leeway to gather additional evidence to substantiate Garner's claims. 

"We are not trying to determine the Iran-Contra affair," Rafeedie snapped. "Suppose I accept as true everything you have said. . .I don't see the relevance." 

Braun complained that Rafeedie's gag order would make it impossible for him to find witnesses to corroborate Garner's contentions, but Rafeedie was unmoved, and he refused to allow Braun to pursue the subject. Garner, during his testimony, did manage to tell the jury that he discovered "the CIA was doing, conducting illegal activities in which the guys in the CIA were getting rich," but the jurors were told to disregard the comments. 

Six of the seven deputies were convicted of corruption charges and sent to prison. Garner received one of the harshest sentences—fifty-four months. In 1996 he was released from prison. He emerged defiant. "I didn't pump 500 tons of cocaine into the ghetto," Garner said. "I stole American money and spent it in America. The United States government can't say that." 

Before the Big Spender investigation was over, most of the officers who had worked on the Majors' investigation of Blandón and the Freeway Rick Task Force would be charged with crimes or forced out of law enforcement. 

Bell PD detective Jerry Guzzetta—the narcotics officer who originally began the investigation into the Blandón operation—was accused of stealing cocaine, but never charged. In 1988 IRS agent Carl Knudsen, who'd had a falling-out with Guzzetta over his handling of the Torres brothers, blamed Guzzetta for the disappearance of six kilos of cocaine the police department had stored in a public storage locker. The L.A. County Sheriff's Office was called in to investigate but could find no evidence that Guzzetta had anything to do with the theft. (Indeed, it was discovered that the Bell police had given one of the keys to the locker to a convicted drug dealer working as a police informant.) Though two prosecutors examined the case and declined to press charges, Guzzetta said the investigation ruined his career. He filed a lawsuit against the city, which was later settled out of court, and retired on a partial disability. 

He remains convinced that he and the Majors were targeted for destruction because of their investigation of Blandón. "Every policeman who ever got close to Blandón was either told to back off, investigated by their department, forced to retire or indicted," Guzzetta complained to police investigators in 1996. He "felt that he had been victimized by a conspiracy which damaged and ruined many police officers who had attempted to bring Blandón and his organization to justice." 

Former deputy Virgil Bartlett, who assisted on the Blandón raids, disagreed. "Nobody humbugged Operation Big Spender. Nobody set us up. We screwed ourselves. Nobody prosecuted me for anything I didn't do." 

The last Big Spender indictment to come down was against Sergeant Thomas Gordon, the chief investigator of the Blandón case, who was accused of spending stolen drug money to fix up his house in San Dimas. He was charged with money laundering and tax evasion and, representing himself, fought the government to a draw on money-laundering charges. He was convicted on the tax charges.

Defense lawyer Harland Braun had no way of knowing it, of course, but his efforts to drag Ronald Lister into the 1990 Big Spender case came perilously close to exposing the Contra drug connection—which may explain the Justice Department's frenzied efforts to gag Braun and keep the lid on the 1986 raids on Lister and Blandón. 

By the time of the deputies' trial, Ronald Lister was working for the DEA as an informant, and had been briefing federal prosecutors about his work on behalf of the Contras and the CIA during the 1980s. The DEA considered him to be such a valuable source of information that it had interceded with local police to keep him out of prison. 

Lister's transformation from a drug trafficker to a drug warrior began in August 1988, when he met a prostitute at a party and confided that he could get her some cocaine if she wanted it. The hooker, a police informant, ran to tell the cops, and the Costa Mesa Police Department sent out an undercover agent, who ended up buying two kilos of cocaine from the ex-detective. But after just two days in jail, Lister was released on his own recognizance and put back on the streets, apparently having convinced the Costa Mesa detectives that he would be more valuable to them as an undercover informant. 

In late 1989, to the chagrin of Costa Mesa authorities, Lister was arrested by DEA agents in San Diego and charged with conspiracy to distribute thirteen kilos of cocaine. 

But the same thing happened again. Instead of being taken off the streets, Lister was soon back walking them as an undercover police informant. Lister had mesmerized the DEA and U.S. Attorney's office as easily as he had charmed the Costa Mesa police. Why were these police agencies so eager to drop slam dunk drug cases for the honor of having Ronald J. Lister as an informant? Easy. He was their ticket to the big time. He was going to lead them to the crime of the century. 

Today, the cops and lawyers who worked with Lister call him a pathological liar, a master manipulator, a charlatan, a con man, a louse. But that wasn't what they thought when they signed him up as an informant and turned him loose on an unsuspecting public. They thought he was James Bond. And they fancied themselves as M. 

During the negotiations for Mr. Lister's services, his attorney, Lynn Ball, sent the San Diego DEA and U.S. Attorney's office a resume of his client's work history, touting him as a man who "has the experience to be one of the most outstanding [informants] any agency could have." Lister "knows the cocaine business better than most people," Ball said. He'd worked "for the governments of El Salvador, Colombia, Italy, and Iran." He knew intelligence operatives and weapons smugglers. He had worked with the Contras, including Eden Pastora. And, he could finger Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandón. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Amalia Meza, in a 1997 interview with CIA inspectors, said San Diego DEA agent Chuck Jones suggested using Lister as an informant in an investigation he was conducting of Danilo Blandón, so she asked Lister's attorney, Lynn Ball, if Lister would be interested. The reaction from Lister's lawyer was memorable. "Ball indicated that Lister was going to have to check with 'the Agency' first to see if he could provide information regarding the Blandón organization," prosecutor Meza recalled. "Ball later indicated that Lister had been given 'clearance' to cooperate." Lister then began a series of extensive debriefings and grand jury appearances. "Lister alluded to the CIA during debriefings, but no one from the investigative team pursued that subject," Meza reported. "The focus of the U.S. Attorney's investigation was on cocaine smuggling." She claimed she "never questioned Lister about, nor allowed him to discuss, any involvement of CIA or any other U.S. government agency during these debriefings" [emphasis added). 

But Lister said there was another motive behind the prosecutor's lack of curiosity about such an interesting topic. In a letter to his reputed "CIA contact," David Scott Weekly, written while Lister was in prison in July 1990, Lister said his debriefers "are purposely staying away from anyone who might be connected to the Agency, like Pastora. They would like me to tell them who they can't get because of a nat'l sec [national security] block," Lister informed Weekly. "They are extremely afraid of a nat'l security block. So their logic is to go after. . .people and assoc. . ..where personal gain is clear and no Contra activity appears. They say they don't even want to know about the Contra organization or anything related." 

Lister appeared before a federal grand jury four times providing detailed physical evidence, a complete chronology from 1982 to 1986 of "a big Central American operation," and naming roughly 80 people who worked with the Blandón drug ring. He also provided information to San Francisco FBI agent Don Hale, Norwin Meneses' pursuer. Lister said Hale was convinced that Lister and the Nicaraguans "were connected with the CIA. . .[Hale] wanted to prove a connection between the U.S. government, the Contras and drug smuggling." 

On December 20, 1990, ten days after the verdicts in the first Big Spender case were handed down, Ronald Lister was released from federal custody and sent out into the world as an undercover DEA informant "to assist the government in an investigation." He went to work as a salesman for a San Diego company called Markon Inc., an international barter brokerage owned by Scott Weekly, aka "Dr. Death." Whether the DEA was using Weekly's company as cover or if Lister was also spying on Weekly is not clear. 

Whatever the reason, DEA records show that Lister began engaging in some very unorthodox activities for a federal informant—moving mountains of cash for drug traffickers, just as he'd done while working with Blandón in South Central. Barely six months after he began working for the DEA, Lister strolled into Anthony's Fish Grotto, a waterfront San Diego restaurant, to have lunch with several Colombian drug traffickers and their associates. Unbeknownst to Lister, two of the men at the table were undercover DEA agents, posing as money launderers. 

According to their reports, one of the Colombians demanded to know what Lister had done with some $500,000 he'd been given to launder. "At this time, Lister commenced to explain how he had originally received instructions from Colombia to wire transfer the money to a European bank, only later to be told to transfer it to another account," the DEA report stated. "Lister went on to say that he could not wire transfer the money from the account again since it was originally laundered with the assistance of the CIA. At this time, Lister explained how he and the CIA used to transport multi-hundred kilo loads of cocaine from Cali, Colombia and Costa Rica to the U.S." The DEA agent wrote that Lister had a paper in his hand that "appeared to be a copy of an outgoing wire transfer. On it, the agent noticed the following: 'Swiss Bank of New York, World Trade Center, #101-WA' (the rest of the numbers not obtained.)" 

Lister was asked by one of the undercover agents "if he knew what would happen to him if he refused or failed to pay back the money. Lister replied that he had nothing to fear since he worked for the CIA. At this time the agent asked Lister if he was also employed with the FBI or the DEA, to which he replied, 'No.'" Lister's explanation apparently didn't mollify the Colombians. The group's leader, Osvaldo Montalvo, was overheard telling his associates "that Lister was a dead man." 

A few days later, according to a federal prosecutor familiar with the case, "one of our undercover agents was being contacted by the Colombians and they said, 'By the way, we want to kill this guy Lister, and if we can't kill him we're going to kidnap his mother and put her on the phone and torture her so he pays us back the $600,000 he stole from us.' We ran Lister through the indices and he showed up as an informant, so we brought him in, actually brought him into San Diego PD and said, 'We have reason to believe there is a threat against your life, a serious threat. We are taking it seriously, we are offering to protect you if you want it.'" 

Lister, he said, laughed off the offer to place him in the Witness Protection Program and said he wasn't afraid of any "fucking Colombians." 'The prosecutor made Lister sign a waiver of liability absolving the Justice Department of any responsibility in case he turned up dead. 

Lister went back to one of the Colombians and told him that he knew what they were up to. He was so unconcerned, he said, that he had declined federal protection, which he proved by whipping out the liability waiver he'd signed. He told the Colombian that he "did not need any protection since he and his associate, Scott Weekly, could take care of themselves. Lister further commented that Weekly was a U.S. Seal and well equipped to take care of anything." 

To show the Colombian he was serious, Lister also pulled out some surveillance photos of the undercover DEA agents who'd been at lunch with him. "The photographs appeared to have been taken from a top floor," a DEA report stated. "Lister claimed that the photographs were taken by his surveillance people." 

In mid-June 1991, the prosecutor said, federal agents intercepted the hit team the Colombians had sent to kill Lister. "They were stopped at the Temecula immigration check point with a picture of Lister and a map to his mother's house and they were in the country illegally and we deported them," he said. "We saved his worthless life." 

Embarrassed by the fact that another DEA team had discovered their prize informant was laundering money for Colombian drug dealers, Lister's DEA handlers threw him in jail for violating the terms of his plea agreement. In a motion filed to cancel their deal and send Lister to prison, the case agents claimed Lister was involved in money laundering through Weekly's company, Markon Corp., which they said "was set up to launder money from narcotics and weapons sales. . .defendant intended to sell weapons as well." Weekly insisted Markon was a legitimate trading company. In any event, no charges were ever filed against Markon or Weekly. 

Lister and his attorney bitterly protested the DEA's attempt to toss the ex-cop back in prison, and argued that Lister had provided quite a bit of help on the investigation of Blandón and Meneses. If the feds couldn't bust the Nicaraguans, they said in a court motion, that wasn't Ronald Lister's fault. "These reasons may have more to do with so-called 'national security' and political decisions made by the Attorney General, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies," the motion stated. "A decision not to prosecute individuals in order to avoid embarrassing high government officials for possible complicity in drug dealing should not be sufficient reason for this defendant not to be able to have the advantage of his plea bargain for cooperation." In a letter to federal Judge Rudi Brewster, who was handling the case, Lister warned him that the federal government had been playing games with the Blandón case for a long time. "In 1986, the main players and myself came very close to indictment but the government chose not to proceed because of 'matters of national security,'" Lister wrote. 

After first granting Lister's motion for a hearing, Judge Brewster quickly changed his mind and ordered Lister to serve eight years in prison for drug trafficking. The Blandón investigation was taken away from Lister's handler, Amalia Meza, and given to Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale, a man who is quick to inform people that he has a top secret security clearance and is an expert in handling national security cases. (Coincidentally, O'Neale was the Assistant U.S. Attorney who five years earlier indicted former Green Beret Colonel James "Bo" Gritz for misuse of a passport, shortly after Gritz and Scott Weekly returned from Burma singing songs of CIA involvement with heroin trafficking.) O'Neale would eventually become Blandón's biggest booster within the Justice Department. 

DEA agent Judy Gustafson said Lister dropped by her office shortly after his release from prison in 1996 to pick up some belongings and once again "discussed his connection to the CIA." If the Justice Department thought the CIA would ever tell them anything about him, Lister laughingly told the agent as he headed out the door towards freedom, they were dreaming. 

For Ricky Ross, Operation Big Spender brought only glad tidings. He became one of the federal government's star witnesses in the second round of corruption trials in 1991, and his appearance on the witness stand was, in some ways, an historic occasion. It was the first time that the man who had helped touch off L.A.'s crack explosion appeared in public to tell his story. The federal prosecutor handling the case called Ross "probably the most significant drug dealer" ever to testify for the government. Freeway Rick, along with a host of lesser dealers appearing as government witnesses, opened up the inner world of big-time crack dealing to a wide-eyed public.

Ross bluntly told the jurors that by the end of the 1980s he'd sold thousands and thousands of kilos of cocaine in South Central L.A., becoming a multimillionaire by the time he was twenty-two. He told of the properties he owned, the big speedboat he had docked at Marina Del Rev, his fleet of cars, his ski trips to Aspen, and his fourteenth-row seats at the Lakers games. Another major LA. crack dealer who testified for the government, Alander Smith, corroborated Ross's story. 

"Smith waxed at length on the economic empire—including a thriving tire shop, apartment investments and motel construction—of Ricky Ross, a convicted trafficker who has been described as the godfather of the rock cocaine trade in South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1980s," the San Diego Union Tribune reported. 

But Smith, who was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, made his federal handlers cringe when he launched into an impromptu lecture on the Drug War. Peering intently at the jury from behind steel-rimmed glasses and firmly gripping the microphone at the witness stand, Smith accused government officials of bringing drugs into the United States. "Yes, I mean President Bush," Smith told the jurors pointedly. "When he was with the CIA and now. . .. The government is the only people that have the access to the equipment, but the minorities are the ones who do the time for it." 

Such comments, combined with the sentence reductions and other favors Ross and his cohorts had been given by the government to secure their cooperation against the deputies, didn't sit well with the jurors, who had difficulty accepting the testimony of drug dealers over the denials of the accused officers. Under cross-examination, Ross admitted that the Justice Department had agreed to cut his sentence in half and had permitted him to keep his remaining properties and his money, which he valued at around $2 million. 

Outraged, the jurors acquitted most of the indicted officers and cited Ross's deal as one of their reasons. "They really gave away the farm on that one," one juror told the Los Angeles Times. 

The LAPD detective who was the architect of the Freeway Rick Task Force, Ross's nemesis Steve Polak, was one of those acquitted. He was later reindicted on civil rights and income tax charges and pleaded guilty to violating Ollie Newell's civil rights by beating him up. Embittered, Polak retired from the police force, complaining that he'd been sold out by his own department and persecuted by government lawyers who'd "crawled into bed with drug dealers to go after cops." 

Though the Big Spender investigation was ultimately a flop for the Justice Department, Ross had lived up to his end of the bargain. In February 1992, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Emmick (who would later gain notoriety as a member of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's Whitewater prosecution team) dutifully went to court and urged that the crack lord be given a break, praising his cooperation as "more than satisfactory." Ross, Emmick said, "was on the stand for three to four days. He was cross-examined in excruciating detail about all imaginable subjects. Ross answered those questions without hesitation and, in my opinion, did so honestly and candidly." 

His sentence was trimmed from ten years to fifty-one months, which made him eligible for release in a little over a year. Ross was sent to the federal prison in Phoenix, Arizona, to serve the rest of his time. 


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