April 24, 2012 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:34:59
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Oh, we're back. | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by The Fleshlight. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What's a fleshlight? | ||
| It's a thing you fuck. | ||
|
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It's delicious. | |
| It's a thing you fuck. | ||
| Deal with that. | ||
| It's a sex toy. | ||
| Yeah, it's embarrassing. | ||
| Yeah, but it works. | ||
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| We also make a bunch of different supplements. | ||
| For health and wellness and for cognitive ability, what AlphaBrain is is a nootropic. | ||
| It's my favorite of all the supplements that I take. | ||
| If you go to onnit.com, O-N-N-I-T, it'll explain everything, all the ingredients, what it does. | ||
| Don't just look at that, though. | ||
| Google nootropics. | ||
| Find out about the pros and cons if you're interested. | ||
| But what they are basically is vitamin supplements that enhance the way your brain produces neurotransmitters. | ||
| It enhances your brain's ability. | ||
| It gives you all the building blocks for all the stuff that makes your brain work well. | ||
| I need some of that, Joe. | ||
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| I got you, Rick Ross. | ||
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| The first 30 bottles is a controversial sort of supplement, and we want to make it as clean and easy as possible. | ||
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| It's a staple in my diet. | ||
| I take that shit every day. | ||
| I just took three right before this meeting because Rick Ross is here and we're about to get busy. | ||
| This is going to be interesting, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Strap yourself in. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
|
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Ladies, ladies and gentlemen, we're going into the rabbit hole today. | ||
| This is going to be an interesting one. | ||
| This is going to be a weird one. | ||
| We have here former aspiring tennis star. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You were an aspiring tennis star? | ||
| I was an aspiring tennis star, yeah. | ||
| This is a man who eventually went on to become probably the most famous drug dealer in the history of Los Angeles. | ||
| I would say that's as accurate as you can get. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're the most... | ||
| If not the United States. | ||
| If not the United States. | ||
| Not the biggest. | ||
| It's right up there, though. | ||
| The most famous. | ||
| Not the biggest, but the most famous, yeah. | ||
| You got a dude who stole your fucking name. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Like, three people stole my name, for sure. | ||
| Three people? | ||
| Yeah, three people. | ||
| Three rappers or three different drug dealers? | ||
|
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Rappers. | |
| Let me see. | ||
| We know the guy who's probably the most famous out of all of them is William Roberts who goes by Rick Ross. | ||
| And he's the rapper that is a former corrections officer. | ||
| Correctional officer. | ||
| How hilarious is that? | ||
| And they say he's the best gangster rapper ever. | ||
| Better than Pac and Biggie. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| And then we got my man, who I'm cool with, you know, and I don't mind him using parts of my name. | ||
| It's Freeway out of Philly. | ||
| And we also have, it was a Freeway Rich out of Kansas City that did pretty good in the Midwest. | ||
| There are also some guys right now out of Ohio who go by the name of the Freeway Boys. | ||
| That's four different groups that have taken my name and parts of my persona and used it. | ||
| One of them got very famous though. | ||
| Very famous right now, yeah. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| And you know what's really fascinating? | ||
| It's kind of weird too, you know, to take somebody's name and identity and claim it as your own and their background. | ||
| What's hilarious, I'm going to send Brian a link of where he talked about it. | ||
| He had come on this dude's show, and the guy asked him about it, and his reasoning response was so stupid. | ||
| It's amazing the guy is as successful as he is, because he was like, you know, no, no, no, that happened like 10 years ago. | ||
| I got that nickname. | ||
| I wasn't even about that. | ||
| What the fucking answer is that? | ||
| That shit doesn't even mean... | ||
| When you know, you know that the dude exists. | ||
| I know, okay? | ||
| I'm a white stand-up comedian. | ||
| I know who Freeway Ricky Ross is. | ||
| You don't know, and you're a fucking corrections officer who became a rapper. | ||
| And you're in that world, and you don't know who Rick Ross is, and you just happen to have his fucking name. | ||
| Well, you know, the guy... | ||
| One thing I gotta get a guy is he's powerful. | ||
| He done put some moves together now that he's getting courts... | ||
| And everybody will do what he wants them to do. | ||
| So whatever he's doing, he's damn good at it. | ||
| I mean, you know, to have the judge to rule in his favor the other day was like really, really ironic to me. | ||
| I could not believe that somebody could say that if somebody steals something from you, no matter how long it is that it takes you before you catch them and can bring them to the jurisdiction's attention, How could they say that the statute of limitations had ran out? | ||
| That was just so crazy to me. | ||
| How do you have a statute of limitations on your name? | ||
| That's what I was saying. | ||
| I mean, if somebody steals something from you, I mean, it takes you 10 years to catch them with it, and you catch them with it, it has all the makings on it that is yours, how could you not be made to give it back? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| You said, oh, well, he had his 10 years, so now it's his. | ||
| Well, what's really crazy is that it's in the most... | ||
| I mean, rap... | ||
| The world of rap is supposed to be the most legitimate world ever. | ||
| Like, you can't get caught with any bullshit. | ||
| You can't get caught faking anything. | ||
| If you get caught faking anything, people will turn on you. | ||
| It used to be like that. | ||
| It used to be like that. | ||
| If you beat a lyric... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you bit somebody's rhyme or lyric, you are done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, remember Nelly Vanelli? | ||
| I mean, those guys last... | ||
| Millie Vanelli? | ||
| Nelly Vanelli? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, those guys weren't really rappers, though. | ||
| You know, but I mean, Rick Ross is like... | ||
| But it was still during the time of genuine, real. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And now I think that the time has changed so much that it's not about real anymore. | ||
| It's about... | ||
| I'm faking it. | ||
| Well, it's once someone gets popular enough that they bypass the underground hardcore fans and they make it into the mainstream and then they become a part of pop culture. | ||
| Like this, everyday I'm hustling. | ||
| That just got into the mainstream culture. | ||
| Because the words in between that, they're not good. | ||
| He's not a good rapper. | ||
| It's that everyday I'm hustling is just so good. | ||
| When you hear that in a club, you're like, damn, that's good. | ||
| You know, it's just such a good hook that that made him. | ||
| I mean, that's where it all took off for him. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then you have Universal behind you pushing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, they start pushing stuff down our kid's throat, you know, and next thing you know, they're taking it. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| So he's got your name now. | ||
| So now it's legal that he's got your name. | ||
| Why wouldn't he use his own fucking name? | ||
|
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I don't know. | |
| Rick Ross is just a name, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's not like Starchild, Beyond the Grave, you know what I mean? | ||
| You don't have some crazy fucking name. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| His real name? | ||
|
unidentified
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William Roberts III. What's wrong with Bill Roberts? | |
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
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How about Bill Roberts III? I'm ready to wrap it up here. | |
| Rick Ross. | ||
| Rick Ross sounds like a guy who sells you real estate. | ||
| You could be like on one of those billboards that they have on the bus stops. | ||
| Rick Ross, a big smile on your face. | ||
| If my mom were to name me William Roberts, my name would be William Roberts. | ||
| Yeah, you'd be Freeway Will Roberts. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What's wrong with that? | ||
| Hey man, we can't hear you in the background. | ||
| There's no microphone. | ||
| Even that, everyday I'm hustling is something that I used to say. | ||
| He got that out of a book that Gary Redworld called Dark Alliance. | ||
| And you know, I was telling Gary that I'm hustling every day. | ||
| So he took that and turned it into a song. | ||
| So, I mean, you know, I don't know what it is with this guy. | ||
| You know, he tattooed my name on his hand. | ||
| That's so strange! | ||
| I mean, I'm a little... | ||
| That's so strange! | ||
| It's a little weird, you know? | ||
| And he used to be a corrections officer, which is really fucked up, because to become a corrections officer, they gotta do a background check on you. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| They gotta make sure you're not a felon. | ||
| Squeaky clean. | ||
| Yeah, you can't be this gangster dude and be a fucking guy who is a corrections officer. | ||
| We should get his application and read what it says, what it takes to be a correctional officer. | ||
| All the criteria. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about the pictures of him with the outfit on? | ||
|
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You seen that? | |
| I saw those. | ||
| Shit's ridiculous. | ||
| I saw it with the smooth face. | ||
| What's really fucked up is there's a video of him, an old video of him, and you're on the video. | ||
| You're on the beginning of it, and then he comes out like, he knew who the fuck you were. | ||
| He put you in his video, right? | ||
| Yeah, but he said he didn't know who I was. | ||
| Under oath, too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| How do you not bring that video in and just stick that in his face and it should be case closed? | ||
| Well, the judge didn't want to see that. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| So is the judge just getting bribed? | ||
| Must be. | ||
| I mean, you know. | ||
| Has to be. | ||
| It looks funny to me. | ||
| How can you... | ||
| That has to be bribery. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| That judge should be in jail. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| That's your fucking name, man. | ||
| That's your fucking name. | ||
| I mean, and to let this guy come in court and say that... | ||
| He never heard of you. | ||
| He never heard of me. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| And how he invented the name, you know, was like, wow. | ||
| You know, he gave us some elaborate story. | ||
| When I heard him on this video, it was so stupid. | ||
| He was like, no, the name came about like 10 years ago. | ||
| Like, what does that mean? | ||
| It was like a non-answer to the question. | ||
| And then he tried to beat past it, the question, just talk about how people just like to talk a lot of shit and start a lot of shit. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| Yeah, he likes to bolo. | ||
| He likes to bolo people when you come in. | ||
| Either you're going to do the interview or you ain't going to do the interview. | ||
| I ain't going to talk about this. | ||
| I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| So he doesn't just come in and just have a conversation with you. | ||
| He comes in with a specific set of rules. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I think most of his interviews are rehearsed and written down the way they seem like to me. | ||
| I mean, everything about this guy is suspect. | ||
| When I was in jail, somebody wrote me a letter and said, Hey, his beard is fake. | ||
| What? | ||
| Could you imagine you catch him backstage gluing black cotton balls on his face? | ||
| Yeah, this chick wrote me and said, oh, his beard is fake, too. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's just so much stuff. | ||
| You know, you hear people, you know, shooting your messages and all kind of stuff like that there, man. | ||
| Matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago, I get a call and it was a guy that was in jail. | ||
| While he was a correctional officer. | ||
| You should hear the story this guy had to say. | ||
| What'd he have to say? | ||
| What'd he say? | ||
| Oh, man, he said this guy was one of the worst CEOs that you could be. | ||
| You know, he was one that... | ||
| See, a CO really doesn't have power. | ||
| He has to go to his boss and tell his boss on you. | ||
| So he said that this guy was running around the cell, sneaking, trying to hear what they talking about. | ||
| And if they shooting dice, he'd run up and tell his boss, "Hey, they're down there shooting dice, boss. | ||
| Let's go get 'em." - Really? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's the kind of guy they use him for. | ||
| And then like when they do raids, you know, when they raid your cell, he would be the first one they push in, you know, the big fat guy, you know, 'cause everybody be kind of scared of the big fat guy. | ||
| So they would all get behind him and shove him up in the cell so all this big blob of meat is coming at you, you know? | ||
| So he was their battering ram. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's so fucked up that that guy got legitimate, that all of a sudden he's a legit rap star. | ||
| Man. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| It's fascinating how that snuck by, you know? | ||
| Well, you know... | ||
| Our people just let him slide him on in there on us, you know, and slowly and slowly he was accepted, you know. | ||
| It seems like that can't last. | ||
| It seems like, you know, rappers have a short shelf life anyway, a lot of them. | ||
| I mean, there's dudes like Jay-Z and Nas that will just stick around just because they're so talented. | ||
| You can't stop them. | ||
| But a lot of rappers, they come for a little while and then they go, I kind of think this is going to take wind out of his sail eventually. | ||
| Well, I don't know, you know, when those people put, when labels put that money behind you and you become their money cow, you know, they have a sense of just shoving you down everybody's throat, you know, keeping you on the radio. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And anything people hear on the radio, you know, they believe it. | ||
| Once they can get money out of you, they know they can keep getting money out of you, so they just use you as a cow. | ||
| They just use you as a cow. | ||
| So they keep milking you and keep milking you. | ||
| And it's going to be up to the people to say, you know what? | ||
| We don't care how many times you shoved this guy in our face. | ||
| We're not buying him. | ||
| We know he's a correctional officer. | ||
| We know he never sold drugs. | ||
| We know he's a fake. | ||
| And we know he stole Rick Ross' name. | ||
| And he's got your name tattooed on his body. | ||
| And we want him to give it back. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| That's what the streets need to tell him. | ||
| Give Rick back his fucking name. | ||
| Yeah, give him back his fucking name, bitch. | ||
| If it makes me feel any better, he was on a TV show and he left his hat there and our friend Tom Segura stole his hat and he wears it every day. | ||
| Tommy! | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, Tommy was excited that I'm going to talk to you. | ||
| He's a stand-up comedian, good friend of mine. | ||
| Now your story is you were an aspiring tennis star and then you went on to make somewhere in the neighborhood roughly of like $600 million from selling crack in Los Angeles. | ||
| Yeah, in like two years I did that. | ||
| That was my last two years. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Before that, I made a lot of money. | ||
| What's really crazy is that this all has a connection, not just to Los Angeles, but to Ronald Reagan and Oliver North and the Contras in Nicaragua. | ||
| This is what... | ||
| A lot of people don't know. | ||
| There's crazy conspiracy theories of people always talking about, oh man, the CIA sells drugs, and then, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone, and we never landed on the moon. | ||
| And when you talk about conspiracies, people go, what the fuck are you talking about, you crazy asshole? | ||
| You really believe the CIA sold drugs? | ||
| Well, yeah, they did. | ||
| Not only did they sell drugs, Michael Rupert exposed it when the CIA director tried to come to Watts and have this big meaning to try to prove... | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Michael Rupert's a bad motherfucker. | ||
| I saw that on Nightline. | ||
| I mean, even in their own investigation, though, the CIA admitted that they knew about it, that their operatives were selling drugs. | ||
| Now, they did this to fund the Contras because the Congress had cut off funding. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So they needed money to fund the Contras' war against the Sandinistas, who were backed by the Russians. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| And this was during the Cold War, and they were supposedly worried that the Russians were going to take over Nicaragua. | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| Well, that was what they feared. | ||
| You know, I read a couple books on it after I found out after the story broke. | ||
| I wanted to know more about what I was involved in. | ||
| And what they feared is that the Sandinistas, basically, Russia had gave the Sandinistas like $100 million. | ||
| And Congress had cut off all monies to the Contras. | ||
| So they had to figure out a way to raise this money to defeat this army that had $100 million. | ||
| You know, back then I guess $100 million probably would be equivalent to a billion dollars right now today. | ||
| So they were looking for ways to... | ||
| To raise this money. | ||
| So what they decided to do was sell weapons to Iran, convert that money back to Nicaragua to these guys, and these guys could take that money and go and buy drugs. | ||
| That way it wouldn't leave a paper trail back to the U.S. And that's basically what they did. | ||
| And that's what got exposed with the Oliver North trial, and that's when Ronald Reagan had to get on TV and said he couldn't remember. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He couldn't remember whether or not they sold arms to people who hate us. | ||
| And then you know, too, in the Kerry investigations, they told him to stop. | ||
| Right at the drugs, when they started to go into the part about the trafficking and the cocaine, they had it stopped, the hearings. | ||
| Why'd they have the hearings stopped right then? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Just too inflammatory, too problematic? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| My documentary is going to explore that. | ||
| My producer and director for my documentary was sitting there in the Senate hearings, so he's bringing all those tapes. | ||
| When is this documentary going to come out? | ||
| This documentary should be out in like November. | ||
| Of next year, we're hoping. | ||
| Now, did you find out about this connection between the Contras and the Sandinists and all this while you were in jail? | ||
| Yes, I was in jail. | ||
| I was in 96. So you had no idea about the CIA connection? | ||
| No, I didn't care, man. | ||
| I was just trying to make money. | ||
| You know, I was a kid in South Central and I was illiterate. | ||
| I couldn't read, couldn't write. | ||
| And I found out that my tennis career was basically over because I couldn't go to college. | ||
| There's no way I was going to college. | ||
| So where were you playing tennis? | ||
| You know, like tournaments and stuff? | ||
| Yeah, I played tournaments, Southern California tournaments. | ||
| And you know, when you play those tournaments, you don't have to turn in your report card. | ||
| You know, you just go out and play. | ||
| They don't ask you that. | ||
| I also played high school tennis. | ||
| And I had dreams of going to college and playing college tennis. | ||
| And all that was derailed, you know, when it was discovered that I couldn't read or write. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So how did you get through school if you couldn't read or write? | ||
| They just passed you. | ||
| Yeah, man, you know, teachers, they don't really care about If you're getting your education or not, for sure at that time. | ||
| And by me being a good student, I guess, they just kind of like, Felt they were doing me a favor by just letting me get through. | ||
| But being a good student, how can you be a good student if you can't read or write? | ||
| Well, I didn't cause them any problems. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| So you were just dealing with a wild bunch of kids and you were a nice guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sit in my seat. | ||
| You know, probably go to sleep in class most of the time, you know. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And don't cause a teacher no problems. | ||
| You know, if it was time for me to read, I would go to the principal's office, get my swats for being bad in class that day. | ||
| And, you know, the next day I'd come back and go back to sleep. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Isn't it amazing that the standards are so low that all you have to do to be a good student is not be crazy in a problem. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You don't have to participate at all. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| And I never really participated in class. | ||
| You know, none that I can remember. | ||
| Well, I've always said that the number one problem in this country for sure is that we don't care about other people's kids. | ||
| We don't care about how other people's kids are growing up. | ||
| We don't care. | ||
| If it's not your kid that's illiterate, if it's not your kid that's growing up without a father, if it's not your kid who's growing up in poverty, doesn't know where the next meal is, You don't give a fuck. | ||
| But meanwhile, you give a fuck about what's happening in another part of the world, you know, freedom in Afghanistan and all this nutty shit that went on in Iraq. | ||
| Our real war is with our own people that we have to live with, our own national community. | ||
| And our national community has six bots, and these six bots are the ghettos. | ||
| And it's real simple. | ||
| If you get an unlucky roll of the dice and you're born in that six bot, well, guess what? | ||
| You're fucked. | ||
| You're fucked. | ||
| You gotta figure out a way out of that somehow or another but the odds are long against you. | ||
| Long against you. | ||
| And that's a real travesty. | ||
| It is. | ||
| We as human beings concentrate on some shit that's going on in another part of the world that's not even connected to us and we don't concentrate on people that we're gonna fucking come in contact with. | ||
| And spending billions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Spending more than that, trillions. | ||
| And we're not concentrating on the people that we're really going to come in contact with. | ||
| The people that are going to grow up and be a problem with everybody they interact with because their life is fucked from the get-go. | ||
| And be a problem for your kids. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| Just imagine, you know, in a few years, your kid is walking down the street and he run into one of these kids that didn't get it, you know? | ||
| And you get robbed. | ||
| Your situation is so crazy. | ||
| It's so hard to wrap your head around. | ||
| You were involved. | ||
| You were a part of this gigantic machine and you didn't even know about it. | ||
| You just were trying to sell crack and you just trying to make some money. | ||
| They gave me a way out. | ||
| How did it start? | ||
| How did I start selling? | ||
| Oh man, I was sitting on my porch one day and I was so broke. | ||
| And one of my big homies called me. | ||
| He said, I got the new thing. | ||
| I said, huh? | ||
| He said, man, come over here right now. | ||
| So I jumped in my car. | ||
| I had an old 66 Chevrolet. | ||
| I threw a dollar worth of gas in there and I drove to his house. | ||
| That might have been my last dollar, right? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'm like, wow, I'm going to put my last dollar in the tank. | ||
| I'm through now. | ||
| So when I get to his house, he laid it out. | ||
| It was cocaine. | ||
| And he was like, man, this is a new thing. | ||
| And I saw the movie Superfly and I'm like... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Superfly. | ||
| That's me. | ||
| When I saw Superfly, man, I just love that movie. | ||
| It's hilarious now. | ||
| You try watching it now? | ||
| It's kind of hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I might have to do that. | ||
| When I finally bought my first VCR. Just the way they're dressed, the way they talk. | ||
| He goes, my hall, my vines. | ||
| He goes, this is all I ever wanted in life. | ||
| My hall, my vines, a white woman like you. | ||
| and you know my hall like that's what they used to call their car my vines was his clothes you know it's like the nicknames were hilarious the ones that didn't stick i haven't watched that since like 82 or something man wow but when i bought my first vcr man that was the first one i had i threw it right up in there whoop Wow. | ||
| Okay, so you go over your friend's house. | ||
| He's got it all. | ||
| Now, this is crack, or this is just cocaine or crack? | ||
| It's powder, right? | ||
| But he's cooking it in the rock at that time. | ||
| Now, who taught everybody to cook it? | ||
| How the fuck did that come about? | ||
| Because that, to me, is a massive mystery that someone figured out how to take cocaine and turn it into a more addictive, easier distributor. | ||
| It was already guys cooking it when I started, right? | ||
| But it was only a few of them. | ||
| But his freebase is different than crack, right? | ||
| Yeah, FreeBase. | ||
| Like Richard Pryor had a FreeBase, but it's still the same product. | ||
| They were cooking, but they were just taking coke and cooking it? | ||
| How were they doing it? | ||
| Yeah, you cooked it with ether. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Which was a much more difficult process. | ||
| But it's still the same product, technically. | ||
| The only difference is that with FreeBase, I mean with what they call crack, because we didn't call it crack, we called it ReadyRock. | ||
| ReadyRock. | ||
| Yeah, we called it ReadyRock. | ||
| The difference is with ReadyRock is you use baking soda. | ||
| Now, what I did is... | ||
| In my neighborhood, there's three guys that could cook it. | ||
| These guys were very expensive. | ||
| Very, very expensive to cook it. | ||
| So what I did is once I learned how to cook it from these guys, because I kept watching them do it over and over and over again, and they keep charging me to cook three grams, they might charge you $175. | ||
| So I keep paying... | ||
| How does three grams cost us? | ||
| What is it when you sell it? | ||
| Back then, three grams... | ||
| Back then, three grams would have been about $900. | ||
| So out of $900, you pay them $175. | ||
| That's pretty pricey. | ||
| It was pricey. | ||
| But what they did, it took them 10 minutes, 15 minutes. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you think getting the Coke is the hard part. | ||
| That's the really hard part. | ||
| But then you got to cook it up. | ||
| So, you know, that was another part. | ||
| But once I learned how to do it, what I did is I just started showing all my little friends how to do it. | ||
| You know, so that became like a job for them. | ||
| They could just cook and make, you know, what other guys were charging $175, they could charge $125 and, you know, and just sold the market up. | ||
| But it's weird that Coke is expensive, but crack is not. | ||
| Mm-mm. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| That's a misconception. | ||
| It is a misconception. | ||
| Big misconception. | ||
| Crack is expensive? | ||
| There is no crack without Coke. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you took a key of Coke... | ||
| And you cooked it in the crack, the price don't drop. | ||
| So what is the benefit of cooking it? | ||
| The price goes up. | ||
| The price goes up. | ||
| You make more money. | ||
| Do you need less to get high? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It don't really have anything to do with the high. | ||
| See, if you spend $40,000 for a key of powder, you still got to get at least $40,000 for the key of cooked. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But people think that it's cheaper. | ||
| There's some misconception that they have put in people's mind that rock is cheaper. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| It's still the same key of cocaine. | ||
| You still have to get your money back out of it. | ||
| If you spend $40,000, you still got to sell that rock for $40,000. | ||
| So what is the benefit of turning it into rock, then? | ||
| They can smoke it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that better? | ||
| It's a better high, they say, than smoking powder. | ||
| Do you need less of it to get high that way? | ||
| No. | ||
| So there's no benefit financially going the way of crack opposed to coke if you're trying to get fucked up? | ||
| No. | ||
| If you take powder and put on that pipe, it's going to burn different. | ||
| So it turns the pipe all black and gooey. | ||
| But rock, it took all the impurities out of the coke. | ||
| So now you're just smoking pure cocaine. | ||
| And they like that better. | ||
| And that's what the baking soda comes in? | ||
| That's what the baking soda did. | ||
| And that pulls the impurities out? | ||
| Is that how it works? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It cooked all the impurities out of it and turned it into a gel. | ||
| Now, you meet this guy. | ||
| You go over to his house. | ||
| He's got the Coke. | ||
| And you decide, alright, this is it. | ||
| This is what I'm going to do. | ||
| I'm going to be super fly now. | ||
| Did a light bulb go off in your head? | ||
| No, I didn't believe him, man. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He showed me something that was about the size of a... | ||
| One of those little match heads and told me it was worth $50. | ||
| That's my boy, too, though, you know? | ||
| That's my boy, right? | ||
| If it'd been somebody else, I never would've... | ||
| I wouldn't even touch it. | ||
| But this was my boy telling me this. | ||
| He said, man, that's worth $50. | ||
| I'm like, come on, Mike, stop it. | ||
| I mean, $50, man. | ||
| The police would never catch me with that. | ||
| You know, I'm talking about something so small, you could barely see it. | ||
| You know, I could put it in my fingernails. | ||
| And he telling me that's worth $50, and I just spent my last dollar on gas, and now he telling me that this little thing is worth $50, so I can make my money back. | ||
| What's $40? | ||
| And he gave it to me. | ||
| He'll take it and go. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, you know, I go and I'm going around trying to figure out was it really Coke, you know, so I'm going to everybody and asking and asking and nobody really knew what it was. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| 79, end of 79, beginning of 80. Now, in the 80s, for people who don't know, I was living in Boston at the time, and I remember when crack hit, and it was like a wave of crime just took over. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| It was like a real noticeable increase in crime once crack had become a part of the culture. | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| When people start smoking cocaine, they're gonna do whatever they can to keep that high going, you know? | ||
| Beg, steal, borrow, you know? | ||
| I mean, it was something about it where they said it was so joyful that you never wanted to stop. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Some guys used to say it was the best sensation that they'd ever had before. | ||
| And you never fucked with it. | ||
| I tried it about one week, maybe a week and a half. | ||
| For a whole week? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Was this in the beginning? | ||
| In the beginning. | ||
| Yeah, in the beginning. | ||
| I caught myself early. | ||
| I went through a phase where we thought we came up on some money and then I thought I was rich. | ||
| I had about $10,000. | ||
| And then all my friends were like, man, come on, let's smoke something in weed. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And the good thing, though, I had never smoked weed before in my life. | ||
| That's a good thing? | ||
| It was at that time, yeah. | ||
| So that's probably what helped save me from becoming an addict. | ||
| So that you weren't used to smoking things? | ||
| Right, I wasn't used to smoking. | ||
| I was a tennis player. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| You were healthy. | ||
| I was healthy. | ||
| So when I started smoking, you know, started putting and lacing it in the weed and smoking. | ||
| And I looked up and my money was like... | ||
| Wow, man. | ||
| You had 10,000. | ||
| You down to like 500 now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That quick? | ||
| That quick. | ||
| It was going quicker. | ||
| How'd you stop? | ||
| Was it hard? | ||
| No, I just quit. | ||
| I said, man, this ain't what you went into the game for. | ||
| But was it difficult physically? | ||
| Did you have withdrawal symptoms? | ||
| No withdrawals. | ||
| Uh-uh. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, you have a strong mind. | ||
| You probably pulled yourself out of it. | ||
| It's also in there a week, you know? | ||
| I think that's all it takes. | ||
| I did it for about a week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I never felt the addiction. | |
| I did the baking soda thing. | ||
| How often did you do it? | ||
| For that week, I probably did it twice, three times. | ||
| Two times a day? | ||
| Three times for the whole week. | ||
| I was also doing a lot of cocaine at that point and I never liked the crack. | ||
| Is it some people get addicted and some people don't? | ||
| Is it one of those things? | ||
| You gotta pull yourself and you gotta find a reason why you wanna quit. | ||
| See some people, like I got an uncle, he's been getting high since the day I started. | ||
| And you know what he tell me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I don't wanna quit. | ||
| What am I gonna quit for? | ||
| We had a friend who was a comedian who was a heroin addict who wound up dying. | ||
| Mitch Hedberg, very funny guy. | ||
| Really, really funny dude. | ||
| And they tried to stop him a few times. | ||
| He's like, bitch, I ain't stopping shit. | ||
| That was his attitude. | ||
| He's like, this is me. | ||
| I like this. | ||
| I mean, a person should be allowed to do whatever it is with their life as long as they don't hurt anybody else or infringe on your rights that they want to do. | ||
| I agree, 100%. | ||
| Now, you're sitting there. | ||
| How old were you when this happened? | ||
| When I started? | ||
| 1920. So you're 1920, you get started in it, and then how do you go about going from that to everything branching out to you being the biggest, most famous guy? | ||
| It was, I guess you would say, like an evolution, you know, learning process. | ||
| You know, the first time I learned, that first piece of cocaine I got, I got beat out of it. | ||
| Another one of my big homies beat me out of it, you know, told me let him test it, let him smoke it, and you know, it wasn't big as a match head, so he cut it in half, and he smoked a piece of it, and he was like, oh, that's the way they used to do, you know, when they smoke it, and smack their lips, and tastes all right. | ||
| I need another piece, though, to make sure it's good. | ||
| You don't want to go out there selling nothing ain't right. | ||
| Chipped it again, and the whole thing was gone. | ||
| There was a little teeny-weeny piece left, and he's like, man, I'm gonna go and smoke that, too, and then I'll just pay you Friday. | ||
| Pay you Friday. | ||
| It's never happened, never, has it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hamburger today. | |
| Never. | ||
| I never got that 50. Never? | ||
| You probably never will. | ||
| Those I'll Pay You Friday guys, they never pay. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| So that was my business in the cocaine business. | ||
| So right away you went, okay, I got to be a little more prudent with my fucking, my resources here. | ||
| It started and ended right there, right? | ||
| I felt like my career was over. | ||
| How was I going to go back to Mike and tell you, my man, I'm going to go tell my man, man, I ain't got the $50, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I want to re-up, but I don't have the $50. | ||
| But what happened is that guy who beat me out to $50, And he taught me another lesson. | ||
| He come right back that day with somebody that won $100. | ||
| See, like with people who use, if they owe you, then they'll come and they'll bring somebody else with them and say, oh man, this ain't my money, this is his money. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| So he came back with somebody who wanted to buy a hundred dollars worth. | ||
| And I called my man. | ||
| I said, man, I ain't got your 50, but somebody else want to buy a hundred dollars worth if you want it. | ||
| And he shot over there, served him that. | ||
| And next thing you know, this guy who beat me out to 50 kept bringing person after person after person. | ||
| And next thing I know, I'm making $200 a day, $300 a day. | ||
| But now I'm giving all the money to my man, and one day I was just like, man, I'm going into business for myself. | ||
| So how did you get a distributor? | ||
| Well it started just like that. | ||
| I started off just getting it from him and then I've been talking about going to Venice Skill Center to do upholstery and me and this teacher there that taught the class had become really, really good friends. | ||
| We played tennis together and I just stopped going around him because I spent all my time selling coke. | ||
| And one day I go down, you know, just to see him, because this was my man, and I hadn't seen him, and I said, man, how you doing? | ||
| He's like, man, where you been, man? | ||
| I was like, man, you don't want to know where I've been. | ||
| So I went on and told him, I was like, man, I've been selling coke, you know, that's what I'm doing now. | ||
| He's like, what? | ||
| He's like, all right, my man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So he had a whole different... | ||
| Attitude than I thought he was going to have. | ||
| But you know, he was fly. | ||
| I used to like his little jewelry, and he'd do a brand new Cadillac and all that, right? | ||
| So he said, man, come by the house. | ||
| So I go by the house, man, and he lay it all out. | ||
| He's like, man, you think I got this house, this Cadillac, and these clothes, and I like this here on a teacher's salary? | ||
| No way. | ||
| He said, man, I travel with the world. | ||
| He said, I should sell coke, but I just backed up for a while. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| It's hard to do that, right? | ||
| He had the Nicaraguan connection. | ||
| Yeah, you got to be really, really strong to back up without going to prison or getting killed. | ||
| Very few people do, right? | ||
| Very few do. | ||
| I don't know not one person that just quit on their own, I don't think, without going to prison. | ||
| Wow, that's amazing. | ||
| So this guy gets you the Nicaraguan connection. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He called his guy up, man, and his guy was like... | ||
| I'm from Nicaragua, you know, spoke broken English and gave me some prices, man. | ||
| And it was like all love. | ||
| I was like, man, I'm going to be rich. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So are you familiar with how they got it into the country? | ||
| Or at the time, did you know how they were getting into the country? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| My mind wasn't that big, you know. | ||
| You were 20. I'm 20 years old. | ||
| Never had nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, I hadn't had... | ||
| I had never had $1,000 before I started selling coke. | ||
| I don't know if I had ever had $500. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So, I'm just thankful that I'm in this position. | ||
| I ain't asking no questions. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I'm like Superfly. | ||
| Don't ask no questions. | ||
| As long as the man lets you be the man, leave it alone. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And that's the way I was. | ||
| That was the attitude I had. | ||
| I was just going along with the process. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's got to be a crazy position to be in, man. | ||
| All of a sudden, it starts taking off and you see it and then you're just rolling in this money. | ||
| I mean, it really is like a movie, right? | ||
| Did it feel like a movie to you? | ||
| Like all of a sudden you go from being broke to just bawling. | ||
| It was like a dream, you know? | ||
| You feeling like, you know, finally God had recognized you. | ||
| You know, all this time you had been ignored by God and now all of a sudden, you know, all the things that you had prayed for and hoped would happen in your life had just taken place. | ||
| Wow, that's a crazy way to put that. | ||
| God had recognized you. | ||
| That's how I felt, you know, honest. | ||
| You know, I felt that it was a blessing from God that, uh, That I've been put in that position. | ||
| And now, you know, my family wouldn't have no more hungry nights. | ||
| And we wouldn't be worried about the lights getting cut off, the gas. | ||
| And, you know, those roaches and rats weren't going to be running through the house no more because I was going to get some... | ||
| Rat traps. | ||
| Some rat traps and get rid of them, you know. | ||
| And we was going to patch them holes up in the cabinets. | ||
| And, you know, all the things that I regretted when I was a kid, you know, standing in line with food stamps, all that was over with. | ||
| Did you learn how to read at this time? | ||
| Nah, man. | ||
| I didn't learn how to read. | ||
| I went to prison. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I was forced to learn how to read. | ||
| What did you do with the money? | ||
| How'd you bank? | ||
| Man, I had big safes. | ||
| I had safes. | ||
| They come out to Queen Mary, weigh 2,500 pounds. | ||
| One time they stole my safe out of my house. | ||
| I said, they'll never do that again. | ||
| And this dude put me up on these safes that it took like a little train tractor ringing through. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They wasn't moving that. | ||
| There's not to be a professional safe mover to move them up out your house. | ||
| When they stole the safe out of your house, how much was in the safe? | ||
| Man, I think one time they got like... | ||
| Maybe $180,000, $160,000. | ||
| Wow, in cash, in a safe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you just weren't home or something? | ||
| They knew when you were leaving? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| They knew. | ||
| It probably was an inside job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| You know how that go. | ||
| One of your family members opened the door and let them in. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| That's crazy to think about, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So then you got a big giant safe and you kept it all inside. | ||
| You mean you had to be locked down at all times. | ||
| If you had that kind of cash around, you're not dealing with banks at all? | ||
| Oh no, no, no. | ||
| I didn't go to no bank, man. | ||
| You know my mom, she used to take, because I had a couple of properties in my name, and so my mom, I used to let her go and collect all the rents of my Section 8 checks. | ||
| And she used to just throw them in the bank, because I'd pay the mortgages and stuff out of my dope money. | ||
| The banker used to say, tell your son to come in and meet us. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| He's doing pretty good in real estate. | ||
| Wow, that's hilarious. | ||
| So did you come up with a bunch of businesses to sort of mask your money? | ||
| Yeah, I had a custom time, wheel shop, car wash, shoe store, beauty salon, junkyard, motel, bought an old theater, and I had apartment buildings all over the place. | ||
| I used to build apartment buildings. | ||
| That was like one of my hobbies. | ||
| Did you have to show how you got the money to buy any of these businesses or start any of these businesses? | ||
| I figured out how to launder. | ||
| You know, people taught me how to launder the money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How you go to the bank and you get the cashier's checks. | ||
| So we figured it out how to get around it. | ||
| Now, all this time you couldn't read. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So when you went into the banks and fill out the paperwork, how did you do that? | ||
| Well, I would just have somebody else to do it for me. | ||
| If I'm buying a piece of property, the real estate agent would do most of the work. | ||
| Now, I've had times where they told me one thing and it wasn't what it was. | ||
| So those are the chances that you take when you can't read or write. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Like one time I had a building that I bought and they told me that the note was going to be three thousand a month and the note turned out to be sixty two hundred a month so it cost me like thirty two hundred a month because i couldn't read the contract wow so i mean it's costly when you don't know how to read that's incredible that you accomplish so much without learning how to read that's that's amazing well you know what what i felt is that i had developed a sense of people I could feel good | ||
| people and bad people just sensing who to deal with and who not to deal with. | ||
| You make some mistakes, but overall I think that You know, I did alright with some of them. | ||
| So as long as you were making them money, everybody was making money, everybody was happy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I paid for Anita Baker's first album, too. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Seriously? | |
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's awesome. | |
| Yeah, I financed Beverly Glen Music. | ||
| Otis Smith, who was the owner of the label, rest in peace, he used to take care of me when I played tennis. | ||
| He'll buy me tennis shoes and rackets. | ||
| And so when I came up, I ran into him one day and he wasn't doing all that well. | ||
| So, you know, returned the favor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| That's beautiful. | ||
| He got his tenfold, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When they say you get a tenfold, he used to buy me a tennis shoes and rackets. | ||
| I get him $600,000. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, you know, sometimes you do a good deed, they come back to you. | ||
| Might be, you know, took, well, we 10, 15 years, but. | ||
| So how did it all come apart? | ||
| Man, it was coming apart from the beginning. | ||
| Right away, it was just crazy. | ||
| What wound up happening is, you know, they created this task force called the Freeway Task Force. | ||
| Yeah, that was each group of officers. | ||
| Just to go after you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because you were Freeway Ricky Ross. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They said that my name was ringing so much downtown that City Hall had a special meeting. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They said, who is this guy in South Central making all this money that everybody in South? | ||
| Because what I found out is when I finally got arrested is that not the people who wasn't really telling on me, right, to get me in trouble. | ||
| They was bragging about me. | ||
| Yeah, homeboy Rick, he's a millionaire. | ||
| He got this, he got that. | ||
| He's running the whole hood, you know. | ||
| So this is creating a hysteria downtown. | ||
| And they're like, well, who is this guy? | ||
| Why is everybody talking about him? | ||
| And what I found out, these guys are in jail talking about me, too. | ||
| You know, like they're sitting in holding tanks and they're having conversations about Freeway Rick. | ||
| And so the guards are hearing this. | ||
| And they go and report it, and so now everybody wants to know, now who is this guy? | ||
| Imagine if it was Rick Ross, the fake Rick Ross, who was hearing about the real Rick Ross, and went and reported you. | ||
| Imagine if we find that shit out. | ||
| Hey, hey. | ||
| Could you imagine? | ||
| I mean, that's a goddamn connection right there. | ||
| We might have fucking found the magic bullet. | ||
| Ah! | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| So they hear about you through legend. | ||
| You just become a... | ||
| Now, are you aware of how famous you are at this time? | ||
| No, I'm in a shell. | ||
| See, my guys know that they can't talk about me. | ||
| You talk about me to your girls and nobody. | ||
| You tell them what? | ||
| None of my business. | ||
| If they ain't in our business, they don't even know our business. | ||
| It wind up getting past the line, you know, when you got that line, but it jumped over that line and everybody knew. | ||
| Yeah, it became public. | ||
| Became public. | ||
| And you had no idea? | ||
| I had no idea it was public. | ||
| You thought you were just like a cat hiding under the couch and you think you're hidden but your tail's poking out? | ||
| You know, they think you can't see him. | ||
| You're like, bitch, I see you. | ||
| Yeah, you're mine. | ||
| You're all mine. | ||
| And that's what I was living under. | ||
| I was living under that illusion that nobody knew who I was because I didn't drive the fancy cars, you know. | ||
| I could walk in a restaurant and nobody would spot me. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| They wouldn't be pointing, oh, they're gonna wreck over there. | ||
| So you kept it low-key. | ||
| You stayed in the same house? | ||
| You know, I had houses all over. | ||
| You have a bunch of houses. | ||
| A bunch of houses, but they wasn't, you know... | ||
| Mid-level. | ||
| You get in mansions, nothing crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Pasadena estates with giant lawns and fountains and shit. | ||
| None of that, right? | ||
| Yeah, nothing like that. | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| But what else I found out, though, is that, see, my guys have become so big in their own rights, is if they mention your name one time to their little workers... | ||
| And then their workers run out, oh man, the homie Rick took care of us. | ||
| And these guys' words were so powerful that they would only have to mention you one time. | ||
| You know, they like, I guess you would call them almost like evangelists. | ||
| And that you keep having these type of guys mention your name, then the next thing you know your name is everything. | ||
| This is all what you surmised once you got into prison, really sat down with all the time in the world. | ||
| To analyze what was going on. | ||
| How long did it last? | ||
| How many years did you sell for? | ||
| Eight years. | ||
| Eight years. | ||
| So you were 28 when you got arrested. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| That's a long career for a drug dealer. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| Yeah, most of my friends who started and got big two years, three years, and they gone. | ||
| What kind of car were you driving to try to stay low key? | ||
| Man, I had a Ford LTD station wagon. | ||
| With the wood grain on the side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had the exact same car. | |
| Wood grain on the side. | ||
| And I had the little bird. | ||
| You know, the little funeral home bird. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| On the side of the windows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had a 1981 of this. | |
| But wait a minute, the funeral home bird, did you have that on purpose? | ||
| You put that on there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I put that on there. | |
| So it looked like a funeral home car? | ||
| Yeah, the police put up on the side of that, they looked the other way. | ||
| Nobody want to look in that car. | ||
| That's a... | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| So it was almost like a hearse. | ||
| Yeah, how many people you know want to look in the funeral home car? | ||
| That's brilliant. | ||
| That's fucking brilliant. | ||
| So you were driving around in a scam car. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I knew if the police tried to pull that thing over, the police was in there. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| But you must have looked at Ferraris and Lamborghinis and said, God damn, I could just go buy one of those. | ||
| Oh, my guys had them. | ||
| You know, if I want to go out in a Ferrari, I just call one of my guys. | ||
| Man, I'm going to use your Ferrari tonight. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| You're a vet, you know, without the headaches. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I ain't got to put it up. | ||
| How did you get so smart? | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| It just started coming, you know, just little by little, you know. | ||
| So I'm going to say, no, don't wear no jewelry. | ||
| Because if you wear jewelry, everybody's going to know you sell drugs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| I didn't want my mama to know I sold drugs. | ||
| What did you tell your mama you were doing? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| You know, when she found out I had all that money, man, she... | ||
| One day, because my spot is like... | ||
| My spot was like two or three miles from my house. | ||
| So what I would do is I would go to the spot, work, and every time I'd get like $2,000, I'd run to the house and put it up and run back to the track because you don't want to be standing out on the track with too much money because the police come over, man, where you get $3,000? | ||
| What you doing standing out with all this money? | ||
| Problems. | ||
| So what I would do is every time I'd get a couple thousand dollars, I'd run to the house and put it up. | ||
| So my mom see me keep running the house, you know, back and forth, back and forth, all day long. | ||
| I'm doing this all day, all night. | ||
| I don't do nothing else. | ||
| I ain't got a girlfriend. | ||
| I'm single, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| This is my love is to be out on the track. | ||
| I'm doing this 18, 19 hours a day. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Sleeping, jumping right back in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And all the time you're sleeping, you're losing money. | ||
| Sometimes I sleep in the car on the spot, you know? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| With shit on you? | ||
| Just a little bit, though. | ||
| Are you packing a gun? | ||
| Well, I got my boy standing out. | ||
| He's standing back. | ||
| Like, for instance, we stand out on the street and we call it curb service. | ||
| Now I would be standing out on the curb and then he would be sitting like in somebody's yard with the pistol. | ||
| So if somebody got at me or something like that, then he would just bust out and start running. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So he's from a different vantage point. | ||
| They don't even see him as a part of you. | ||
| They don't even see him as like the police. | ||
| If the police come and raid, they're going to grab us standing out on the block and they're not going to bother him because he's up in somebody's yard. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, you know, we had a little crazy system that we had lined up, man. | ||
| That's brilliant. | ||
| So you had a spot, was like on a street corner or something like that? | ||
| 81st in between Hoover and Vermont. | ||
| It was like apartment complexes, you know, a bunch of apartment complexes. | ||
| And how do you get a spot? | ||
| Do other dudes try to move in on your spot because they know that everybody goes there to buy? | ||
| Well, at that time, nobody was trying to move in on my spot because nobody really could get the cocaine. | ||
| They didn't know how valuable cocaine was. | ||
| They didn't really... | ||
| Really, I had abandoned the spot when other guys started coming in. | ||
| You know, I had gotten so big. | ||
| See, I didn't stay out on the streets long. | ||
| Because I took all my money and parlayed it back into the game. | ||
| So I got big so fast that I was able to then start selling these guys three grams. | ||
| And then they would go out and sell it. | ||
| And I was just making like $50, $75 off every three grams that I would sell them. | ||
| And that started to be so much money. | ||
| That I didn't even need to sell 50s and 100s anymore. | ||
| So people just, they became, you were like the main dude and everybody sold it for you. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So then where did you keep everything? | ||
| Did you have like a warehouse? | ||
| Like how did you have it set up so you could hide it? | ||
| Well eventually what I did is I set up spots. | ||
| Like say for instance if you, eventually when I got real big, I have like $50 spots. | ||
| And if you go to my spot and spend $50, Would be like going to somebody else's spot and spend a hundred dollars. | ||
| You could do what they call double up. | ||
| You could double your money. | ||
| You buy fifty dollars worth, you can make fifty more. | ||
| Now, if you would go there and you start buying those fifties and you get up to spending two thousand, then the people at that house would take you to another house where you would have to come there and spend two thousand. | ||
| Then if you got up to buying ten thousand, then you would get to go to another house. | ||
| And then we would have A lot of these $50 houses, they would be just all over the place. | ||
| And then it would just be a few $2,000 spots. | ||
| And then it would be even less $10,000 spots. | ||
| And this is all for distributors. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is all for distributors. | ||
| So you had like distributing houses. | ||
| You had like a whole tier system. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| That's brilliant. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I didn't know exactly how they called it at the time. | ||
| But I knew... | ||
| See, what I did is I dealt with people the way... | ||
| I wanted to be dealt with. | ||
| I knew the problems that I had when I was coming up, so I tried to cut out all their problems for them. | ||
| I didn't want them to have to deal with none of the headaches. | ||
| You know, not worrying about how to cook it, how to get it at a safe price, how to make sure that the place was safe. | ||
| I took care of all that for them. | ||
| When they came to me, they knew they was going to get their proper stuff. | ||
| They knew they weren't going to be robbed. | ||
| They knew how they would be able to re-up again. | ||
| Everything was like cookie cutter form almost. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So you're doing this for eight years. | ||
| You said from the beginning it was crazy, but when did you start getting legal problems? | ||
| Man, my problem started in around 86. How many years in was that? | ||
| Six years, six and a half years almost. | ||
| So what was it? | ||
| They started arresting you? | ||
| They started asking you where you're getting money from? | ||
| The Freeway Task Force, man, they started to go crazy. | ||
| First, they started to raid spots that we didn't even sell drugs at. | ||
| You know, they started raiding my girlfriend's houses and planting drugs on them, you know, because I didn't keep drugs at my girlfriend's house because I stayed there, you know. | ||
| But those were the easiest spots to figure out, you know, where that were connected to me, you know, where people came over because they would let their friends come over. | ||
| Like my work spots, you didn't come to my work spot unless you sold drugs. | ||
| Wasn't no need for you coming over there. | ||
| Don't even, you know, don't even ask where that's at. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they raided my girlfriend's houses and then they would take them to jail for drugs and stuff like that there. | ||
| So I'm like, wow. | ||
| So then they started to get my guys. | ||
| You know, they started to catch my guys driving down the street, and they were playing drugs on them. | ||
| And it just got really crazy until it got to the point where one night I'm coming from a basketball gym. | ||
| I'm going to adjust your mic real quick. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just put it like this. | |
| It makes a big difference when you're talking to it. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Okay, there we go. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm riding down the street one day, and... | ||
| My and my guys, and we said, man, look at all the homies over there playing dice. | ||
| So they was at my tire shop. | ||
| So we jump out, go by, holler at them, you know, see who winning the crap game. | ||
| And when we get ready to leave, the whole crap game come with me, you know, like it's 10, 11 o'clock at night. | ||
| So they all want to walk me out to the car and make sure everything is good. | ||
| So I jump in the car and pull off, and I look in the rearview mirror, and it's a car following me with no lights on. | ||
| So, we're going to high-speed chase, you know, chase for a few minutes through the hood, trying to lose them, and then I look up, cars all around us coming, lights popping on, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| I'm like, oh man, set up. | ||
| So, uh... | ||
| I wind up getting out the car, jumping out the car, leave the car rolling, and jump out and get away. | ||
| Well, they shooting at me. | ||
| Police. | ||
| Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. | ||
| Bullet's whizzing across my head and the whole nine yards. | ||
| And I get away. | ||
| So once I get away, the next morning my lawyer called me and said, man, you had two kilos of cocaine on you that night. | ||
| I said, man, I ain't had no cocaine that night. | ||
| He said, yeah, they said you had two keys of cocaine and you shot at the police. | ||
| So my mom called me, you know, she's crying. | ||
| Oh, the police been by here, raided the house, had everybody outside handcuffed and said they gonna kill you. | ||
| We want you to turn yourself in. | ||
| So her and my lawyer convinced me to turn myself in and we go in, we, you know, fight the case. | ||
| I wound up beating it, though, because the drugs were all planted. | ||
| How did they prove the drugs were planted? | ||
| Man, it was hard. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I stayed in jail for a while. | ||
| No bail. | ||
| They had me on a million dollar bail, 1251, where all the property and everything had to be inspected and make sure it wasn't drug proceeds and all that. | ||
| Man, it was crazy going through all that. | ||
| But while I was in jail, the cops come down to my cell to interrogate me. | ||
| So they pulled me out of the cell. | ||
| Take me to the back of the jail. | ||
| You know where they whoop people up at and stuff. | ||
| And starting to ask me a bunch of crazy questions about drugs and all this. | ||
| About my lawyer. | ||
| You know, your lawyer should have let you take the deal. | ||
| Who know why he think he's going to fight this case. | ||
| You ain't going to win. | ||
| We always get our man. | ||
| So during this time that they're interviewing me, they're recording everything. | ||
| and at the end of the the interrogation they tell me you better not tell your lawyer what happened if we find out that you told him we're gonna uh we're gonna take care of you so i don't even tell my lawyer so we get to court the next time we go to court and uh they got the guy on the witness stand he's testifying i said man you know that guy came down there and seen me like two weeks ago and so he thinking that i ain't gonna tell my lawyer never right So my lawyer sprang it on him, | ||
| like, man, you was at the county jail a couple weeks ago? | ||
| And he was like, yeah, because, you know, he signed in, so he knew he had to say yeah. | ||
| He said, you saw my client. | ||
| He's like, yeah. | ||
| He said, you knew he had a lawyer, didn't you? | ||
| And he's like, yeah, I knew he had a lawyer. | ||
| Now, don't you record all the conversations when you interview suspects? | ||
| He said, yeah, I want that tape. | ||
| He said, Yana, I want that tape. | ||
| And so they brought the tape in. | ||
| The tape was all spiced up and cut up and erased and all kind of stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| So the judge was like, man, get this case out of here. | ||
| Really? | ||
| But what they did is they took it to the feds. | ||
| And had the feds to indict me without the tape, you know, like that. | ||
| Lost the tape, you know, they never told the feds about the tape. | ||
| So the tape, so the feds indict me for that case. | ||
| But then when they do, I had hired a private investigator to invest the cops, to investigate the cops. | ||
| Then we show them. | ||
| Hey, look what we got on them. | ||
| You guys don't want to use them as witnesses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's hilarious. | |
| What did you get on them? | ||
| Oh man, we had them beating people, playing drugs. | ||
| 150 people got released from prison behind those cops doing what they did. | ||
| What a lot of people don't realize is how deep corruption is in some police forces, especially in Los Angeles at a certain point in time, especially like the Rampart District. | ||
| Like, people don't even know the story behind... | ||
| That was a criminal gang that was running... | ||
| Now, do you know Rampart was a fall off from the Freeway Task Force? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Freeway Task Force was the beginning of that whole thing. | ||
| The Freeway Task Force was the most elite task force in the country. | ||
| Just to get you? | ||
| Just to get me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I feel fortunate. | ||
| What's crazy is you're out now. | ||
| Does it feel weird to be a free man telling this story? | ||
| How many guys get their own task force? | ||
| Very few. | ||
| It was like one in a billion. | ||
| You get you a little rapper puppet, you know? | ||
| Hey! | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got a freeway task force, a rapper puppet. | |
| You've lived a fucking charmed life. | ||
| You sold $600 million worth of coke, yet you're out on the street. | ||
| And now I might be finna get a judge. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You might get a judge? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| In this case, you know, this judge might, I don't know. | ||
| Which case? | ||
| This Rick Ross case? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You think the judge is corrupt? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Are you investigating this judge? | ||
| I am, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, I think you should. | ||
| I mean, I want to know how she came to her conclusions. | ||
| You know, why? | ||
| Why did she? | ||
| Yeah, those are ridiculous conclusions. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I want to get to the bottom of it. | ||
| I'm going to get to the bottom of it, you know. | ||
| Well, have you found anything? | ||
| You probably can't talk about it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is she a Freemason? | |
| A little bit, a little bit, you know. | ||
| He ain't no Freemason. | ||
| He ain't no Freemason. | ||
| He means the judge. | ||
| Yeah, but he's not either supposedly right. | ||
| Is he supposed to be a Freemason or something? | ||
| The rapper. | ||
| Rick Ross is supposed to be a Freemason? | ||
| The fake Rick Ross? | ||
| He said that before. | ||
| What should we call him? | ||
| What the fuck is his name again? | ||
| Billy Bob. | ||
| Let's call him Fat Bill. | ||
| So Fat Bill is supposed to be a Freemason too? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He said it on a couple songs or something like that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But I know the Masons are not really happy with it. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, they contacted me. | ||
| They're not happy with that at all. | ||
| Wow, so you get arrested. | ||
| So eventually, how do you wind up getting taken down? | ||
| You got through all this. | ||
| You got through this one case where they try to plant two kilos on you. | ||
| More supplier, Danilo Blandon. | ||
| He brings me down. | ||
| Your supplier brought you down. | ||
| This was the Nicaraguan guy. | ||
| Yeah, he brought me down. | ||
| He gave you up. | ||
| Gave me up. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| Delivered me. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And this is while the Oliver North shit, all that was going down? | ||
| Was this before that? | ||
| I think it was after that. | ||
| It was after that. | ||
| Ali had got his pardon. | ||
| I need a pardon, too. | ||
| Anybody out there know Obama, tell him I'm looking for a pardon. | ||
| I did my part. | ||
| I mean, why shouldn't I get a library like Reagan? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's so true, too, right? | ||
| If you really find out. | ||
| People think that this is nonsense. | ||
| The connection between the CIA and selling drugs has been pretty well documented. | ||
| Go look up a case on a guy named Barry Seal. | ||
| Barry Seal was a guy out of Mena, Arkansas, who was, by the way, that's Bill Clinton's fucking stomping grounds. | ||
| That's where they were dropping coke. | ||
| They were flying coke in from South America, and they were dropping it off in Mena, Arkansas. | ||
| And the story goes, two kids see the drop. | ||
| They catch the kids and kill them. | ||
| And then they put the kids on the train tracks and say that the kids fell asleep on train tracks. | ||
| They were high and they fell asleep and they got run over by trains. | ||
| So the parents do an autopsy on the bodies and they find knife wounds. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So they find out, no, no, these kids were murdered. | ||
| They go into the story. | ||
| It turns out Barry Seals gets busted because it was his plane that was coming in at that time. | ||
| And then they find out about the coke and he gives up all the information. | ||
| They wind up assassinating him when he was on his way to trial. | ||
| Well, man, Gary Webb killed himself, shot himself in the head twice. | ||
| Twice. | ||
| With a shotgun. | ||
| Was it a shotgun he shot himself in the head twice with? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I haven't saw the reports, but I think that's what somebody said was a shotgun. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you shoot yourself in the head twice? | ||
| It seems like... | ||
| You didn't do the job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You had a job to do and you didn't finish it. | ||
| That doesn't seem to make sense to me. | ||
| Take care of it. | ||
| I've heard it's possible to shoot yourself in the head twice, but that's also the dude who was the whistleblower for Enron, shot himself in the head twice. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not too suspicious, right? | ||
| This gigantic multi-billionaire scam goes down. | ||
| One motherfucker starts ratting people out, winds up shooting himself in a car twice in the head. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Really? | ||
| How many people have committed suicide by a gunshot to the head twice? | ||
| I mean, I've seen people get knocked out with like a little bitty punch. | ||
| And you tell me you shoot at yourself and you're awake after that? | ||
| They had good willpower. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| Make sure the job was done. | ||
| Well, I guess if you had any strength left, if you shot yourself in the head and you realized you were still alive and you had any strength left, you would probably shoot yourself in the head. | ||
| You know, you'd be like, what the fuck? | ||
| I'm gonna just bleed out here in the car? | ||
| Americans buy anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So do you think Gary Webb was murdered? | ||
| I mean, his book, Dark Alliance, essentially what happened is it started out a bunch of articles written for the San Jose Mercury News and it was later published as a book. | ||
| And in a three-part series, he investigated the Nicaraguan linked to the CIA-backed Contras who had allegedly... | ||
| It's like he exposed the whole thing and brought the Reagan administration into light and exposed them for essentially being drug dealers. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And Gary was an amazing man. | ||
| I mean, you know, he's the one who stopped... | ||
| The forfeiture laws. | ||
| You know, they used to take your property before you were found guilty of a drug crime. | ||
| And Gary made them stop that and said, hey, at least you got to take this guy to trial, find out he was selling drugs before you take his property. | ||
| Because before, they would take your property, sell it, and then you get kicked out of prison and you never got convicted. | ||
| And they'd be like, oh, well, your car is gone. | ||
| Well, what's hilarious is if you look at how the Patriot Act has been used, you know, how many times the Patriot Act has actually been used for terrorism, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction because the Patriot Act classifies drug selling Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| fall. | ||
| It's kind of cute. | ||
| It's kind of cute how they've figured out how to circumvent the system. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy the way I saw a thing on CNN the other night, and they were talking about how California has built so many prisons and absolutely no colleges in the past 10 years. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| What happened to an ounce of prevention? | ||
| We're going with pounds and tons of cure, but no prevention. | ||
| Well, the worst thing ever happened that could be possible. | ||
| They made private prisons. | ||
| They made it profitable for people to put people in jail, which is fucking insane. | ||
| That's some Orwellian shit. | ||
| That's some shit that should have been taking place. | ||
| It is slavery. | ||
| It is slavery. | ||
| It's 100% slavery, especially when you have certain government organizations that lobby to keep certain things illegal, like drug selling, like nonviolent crimes, like nonviolent drug offenses. | ||
| When you're telling someone that they don't have control over their own consciousness and because they don't agree with you as to what they can and can't do, you're going to lock them in a cage and profit from it. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| It's a great business for somebody. | ||
| That's fucking amazing, though, that in 2012, with all the access to information that we have today, that that's still a legal thing. | ||
| I mean, it's just another piece of perfect advice or perfect information, rather, that shows you how corrupt the system is. | ||
| Yeah, it's incredible. | ||
| It's incredible when you really stop and think about how many prisoners there are. | ||
| Well, that's good that we got people like you, though, bringing this stuff to light. | ||
| I mean, I don't see why more people don't stand up, you know, but I guess people saw what happened to Gary and they're like, sure. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Me go out there and put my job on the line and my family and their well-being. | ||
| I want to expose shit that's already been exposed. | ||
| I come in like third, fourth, fifth, sixth. | ||
| I'm not the number one guy breaking the news. | ||
| So you make sure it's safe. | ||
| Shit's already clear. | ||
| It's already on the internet. | ||
| By the time I hear about it, I'm like a third-hand reporter. | ||
| Somebody finds it on the internet, they tweet me, I find out about it, and then I go with it. | ||
| But I actually found out about you through Kevin Booth's documentary, The Great White Hope, American Drug War. | ||
| Yeah, Kevin's a good guy. | ||
| Kevin, you know, kept an eye on me when I was in prison, you know, wrote me. | ||
| I could call Kevin. | ||
| He interviewed you from prison as well, right? | ||
| He did, he did. | ||
| When I met with Kevin, Kevin made my life a little easier while I was in prison, you know. | ||
| Shout out to Kevin Booth. | ||
| Kevin produced my first DVD. My first comedy DVD. 1999? | ||
|
unidentified
|
2000? | |
| I read the book that his buddy wrote. | ||
| Bill Hicks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kevin's a good guy though. | ||
| Yeah, he became who he is because of his friendship with Bill Hicks. | ||
| He used to follow Bill Hicks around and record him. | ||
| Bill Hicks, as far as stand-up comedians are concerned, one of the top 10 greatest comedians of all time, for sure. | ||
| Right up there with a lot of people like Richard Breyer. | ||
| Even though he didn't live very long, died of pancreatic cancer when he was only in his young 30s. | ||
| So he creates this documentary, The American Drug War, and that's how I heard about you. | ||
| And that's how I heard about it. | ||
| Because I had already heard about Barry Seals and Barry Seals and his connection with the CIA and selling drugs. | ||
| But I didn't know of any one person like you who could be directly connected to the dude that was connected to Nicaragua, that was connected to Oliver North and the whole chain of events. | ||
| Absolutely, absolutely. | ||
| I think when Blandon testified against me, He talked about his boss going on a fishing ship with George Bush, Sr. Wow. | ||
| When Barry Seale was murdered, he had George Bush's phone number in his pocket. | ||
| Deep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Deep. | |
| As deep as it gets. | ||
| Might have been a tracking device in that phone number. | ||
| We know where you at. | ||
| And meanwhile, no one goes to jail. | ||
| No one on that side goes to jail. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| No one goes to jail. | ||
| Why should they? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| They make the laws. | ||
| But how the fuck did they let you out? | ||
| Me? | ||
| How's that work? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You went in for 20 years? | ||
| I had a life sentence, man. | ||
| And how'd you get out early? | ||
| Learning how to read and write and study the law and found a loophole. | ||
| What was the loophole? | ||
| Well, what they did is they charged me under the three-strike law. | ||
| And what they were saying is that since I had got convicted in all these different states, that those added up to three strikes. | ||
| But what they didn't see in the law is that in order to get struck out, you have to go to prison, get out, then commit another crime, Go to prison, get out, and then commit the third one. | ||
| And that's three strikes. | ||
| So they can't get you on three felonies before you're ever convicted. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's not three strikes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not three strikes. | ||
| Safe ends and what I use is a guy standing out. | ||
| When I used to stand out on the street, I used to make hundreds of sales a day. | ||
| Right there on that one block. | ||
| So I said, now... | ||
| If somebody wanted to, they could have gave me a hundred convictions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because I sold to different people every time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I didn't believe that the law meant that every sale you made was a separate conviction. | ||
| I believe that they meant just like I just explained to you. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Because if so, then everybody who ever sold cocaine would have three strikes. | ||
| And it makes sense because the idea is supposed to be, theoretically, that jail is supposed to be able to rehabilitate you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, if you are unrehabilitatable, if you've gone through two separate times and you're still out doing the same shit, alright, well this dude's a career criminal, this is his third offense, done. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| And that's how the law was rolled up. | ||
| Even though I don't believe you should play baseball with people's lives. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because a person could not be changed at one time and then be changed tomorrow. | ||
| And then the circumstances change and he may be in a different position. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, before you can start passing judgment on people, you have to live in their shoes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, that's why people ask me now, how do I feel about drug dealers? | ||
| And I'm like, I ain't got nothing against them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they do what they feel like they got to do or what they know they got to do. | ||
| So... | ||
| Before we pass judgment, we have to get all the facts and live in that person's shoes to see if we would do the same thing that they did. | ||
| And you're a perfect example of that. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Now, you went away for 20 years. | ||
| You find this loophole. | ||
| How deep into your sentence had you already figured out how to read? | ||
| How long did it take you? | ||
| I started reading immediately. | ||
| Right away? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You took classes there in prison? | ||
| No. | ||
| Me and my Sally taught me how to read. | ||
| He made me some cue cards with my ABCs on them. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| I went from nose to... | ||
| Reading my indictment, to reading the newspapers, to reading law books. | ||
| I mean, you know, for the first time what I found out is that I had never wanted to read before in my life. | ||
| That was the real problem. | ||
| I never really wanted to read. | ||
| I mean, I didn't see any reason why Jack and Jill went up the hill and why I should know. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| They didn't have... | ||
| They wasn't chasing no money. | ||
| I was chasing money. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It wasn't interesting to you. | ||
| It wasn't interesting to me. | ||
| But then, once you realized, well, there's a lot of information that I don't have access to... | ||
| I became an advocate reader. | ||
| I read over 300 books before I left prison. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You've read more books than I have in my lifetime. | ||
| So you're in prison. | ||
| You're learning how to read. | ||
| At what point in time did you start devising a plan to try to figure out a way to get out of there? | ||
| Immediately I was trying to get out. | ||
| I knew that the guys that were going home Was the guys that was going to the law library learning how to become lawyers. | ||
| You know, they knew how to fight the system. | ||
| And then they had, like, guys that all they did all day was sit there and study the law. | ||
| You know, they would sit at a table while other people were playing cards and chess and dominoes. | ||
| They would be studying the law. | ||
| So I got in with those guys. | ||
| That's got to be kind of a crazy feeling, man. | ||
| Everybody's just hoping you can crack this fucking system that's got you locked up. | ||
| Woo-wee, it's tough. | ||
| I mean, your head starts to hurt daily. | ||
| You got, like, migraine headaches. | ||
| And you're sitting in this concrete building. | ||
| I'm going to try to draw a picture for you. | ||
| You're sitting in this concrete building. | ||
| It's 28 stories high. | ||
| Nothing but concrete and steel. | ||
| The windows are about 3 inches wide, open, and about 6 feet long. | ||
| Escape looks almost impossible. | ||
| But, you know, you think about that too. | ||
| Like, if I had a long rope, I could scale the side of the building. | ||
| So, uh... | ||
| It's like a desperation, you know, and you say, man, it gotta be one loophole in these books because you know that if you can show them in the book where they made a mistake or where the book says that they should have did this when they did that, then you know you got action. | ||
| So you're getting headaches just from thinking and reading too much? | ||
| Yeah, that's all you want to do. | ||
| You just want to stay in them books. | ||
| I got a life sentence. | ||
| When you got a life sentence, it's like, this is forever. | ||
| This is all you're going to see for the rest of your life. | ||
| I didn't think that was fitting for me. | ||
| It's amazing that they convicted you for life on that three strikes law. | ||
| It seems like you should be able to go after them for abusing the law, which should be criminal. | ||
| Well, you can't go after a federal prosecutor. | ||
| He's immune from prosecution because he's not working as an individual. | ||
| Even if it's been proven that he's corrupt? | ||
| Well, maybe if you can prove he's corrupt, but not because he's unjustly incompetent in your case. | ||
| You know, if he does something to you, you know, he could charge you with a thousand keys even though you only have one. | ||
| And if you got a thousand keys, that gives you a life sentence. | ||
| If you got one, you can get probation. | ||
| But if it's powder. | ||
| That's a thing people don't know about. | ||
| That's another good point. | ||
| Not crack. | ||
| Because crack was in the ghetto and powder was all these other people, these people that had money, were using the powder. | ||
| Crack is way more illegal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it was 100 to 1. 100 to 1. Wow. | |
| That's incredible. | ||
| Is that racist? | ||
| Very racist. | ||
| It has to be, right? | ||
| And I think... | ||
| I mean, and even though they just changed it 18 to 1, I think that was still... | ||
| Why isn't it one-to-one? | ||
| And that's what I said, because they already proved... | ||
| You know, I sat down on the couch with the guy who invented the law. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, it's going to be in the documentary. | ||
| Sick, sick, sick documentary. | ||
| After you're out, you sat down with them? | ||
| Yeah, I've been doing that since I've been out. | ||
| I've been doing a documentary since I've been out. | ||
| And one of the things that I got mad about, even with Obama and his administration, is that they didn't make it one-to-one. | ||
| And then even after they made it 18-to-one, they left it for guys that have been in 20 years, 25 years. | ||
| They didn't make it retroactive. | ||
| Meaning that they don't get out. | ||
| They don't get no benefit from the 18 to 1. These guys right now, if they had the 18 to 1, they would walk out of prison today. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I'm saying if it's wrong today, And you did it 20 years ago was wronged in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they saying, oh, well, they lost their... | ||
| Because, you know, Clinton signed a bill where you're 2255, you got one year after you're convicted to come up with newly discovered evidence. | ||
| And the law is crazy, man. | ||
| Like right now, say if you go to prison unjustly and you do all your appeals and everything, one year, you got one year to prove yourself innocent. | ||
| Now, after that one year... | ||
| If you don't find it, and then a day after that one, you find this newly discovered evidence, you can't even submit it to the court. | ||
| That's got to be maddening. | ||
| It's maddening. | ||
| They got guys in there that found newly discovered evidence that they can't even submit it for anybody to hear it. | ||
| So when you went to jail for this and when you finally in prison, was this the first time you had ever been in prison other than the one time you got arrested and you stayed in there for a while? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| That was my second time when I got the life sentence. | ||
| I've been in jail twice. | ||
| So you had two strikes. | ||
| You had one strike already. | ||
| I had one strike already. | ||
| And how long did you go away for the first time? | ||
| Five and a half years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And the second time I was entrapped. | ||
| I didn't even go into that part with you. | ||
| I was entrapped because I wasn't selling drugs. | ||
| I was building a youth center because what I did is I figured out what kids in the ghetto need. | ||
| To get them out of gangs and drugs. | ||
| I know what they need. | ||
| What do they need? | ||
| I bought a theater. | ||
| They need some instructions. | ||
| They need somebody to come and walk them through it. | ||
| Somebody they can go and talk to when they need to talk to them. | ||
| Not talk to them once they've already been corrupted and their heads are already in the game. | ||
| They don't want to hear you then. | ||
| I already got my mind made up. | ||
| I know what I'm doing. | ||
| I'm my own man. | ||
| But before they get like that, they need somebody, a place that they can go and they could talk to Joe Rogan or Rick Ross or Magic Johnson or Oprah Winfrey or some of these other people who could teach them how to make money other ways. | ||
| You know, because in the ghetto, you know the first business you see in the ghetto, you know what the first business is? | ||
| What? | ||
| The drug man. | ||
| He's going to be the first businessman that you see in South Central Los Angeles. | ||
| He's going to be the drug man. | ||
| And especially a black man as a business owner because we don't own nothing in South Central. | ||
| So you said you got set up. | ||
| This is the last time? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, when I got to Life Center. | ||
| This guy called me. | ||
| I'm not selling drugs. | ||
| You weren't selling drugs at all? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| How did you stop? | ||
| I hadn't sold drugs in... | ||
| Six years, seven years. | ||
| What? | ||
| How did you stop? | ||
| I just quit. | ||
| Did you quit after you got arrested the first time? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I quit a year and a half before I went to prison. | ||
| I was like, man, I'm through with this. | ||
| I got $800,000, $900,000 cash. | ||
| I got property all over the place. | ||
| All I got to do now is make this property and stuff work for me. | ||
| And, you know, I got enough money to hold me off for a while. | ||
| I'm through with it. | ||
| So I walked away from the game. | ||
| So I'm confused on your timeline here, because when you were 20 years old, that's when you started, and then when you were 28, you got arrested. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you did five years in jail. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where's the five years? | ||
| I did the five years in 89 I went to prison. | ||
| How old were you then? | ||
| 28. Like 28 and a half. | ||
| Okay, so 28 and a half. | ||
| You go to jail for five years, and then you get out for how long? | ||
| I got out for six months. | ||
| For six months, and then they give you the life sentence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| So the life sentence is a total setup. | ||
| Total setup. | ||
| Total entrapment. | ||
| I was not selling drugs. | ||
| Danilo called me. | ||
| Matter of fact, he called me the day I got out of prison. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| He was like, man, I need to see you. | ||
| I was like, man, I'm kicking it with my mom. | ||
| You know, my mom came and seen me and stuff like that. | ||
| So I'm like, I'm kicking it with my mom. | ||
| I'm cool. | ||
| I'll holler at you in a couple days. | ||
| When I finally go and holler at him, he's telling me, oh, man, I got it at this price, I got it at that price. | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| That's a good price. | ||
| And all this is recorded, too, so, you know, that didn't help. | ||
| You know, they was like, oh, you were interested. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So this went on for six months that he courted me, you know, caught on me, dropping the price, dropping the price. | ||
| Motherfucker. | ||
| And then one day he caught me, and I was riding with one of my little homies, Chico Brown. | ||
| I said, man, this dude just told me, woo woo woo, but Chico's like, man, I can sell all that. | ||
| And that's how I got started. | ||
| So I wind up making an introduction to the two of them, Chico handing the money, and police come from everywhere. | ||
| So you never even got to sell? | ||
| No, I never sold it. | ||
| So this guy, where is he now, Danilo? | ||
| He's in Nicaragua. | ||
| Just chilling. | ||
| He's supposed to be in the documentary too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Y'all better check that documentary out. | ||
| It's going to be dope. | ||
| Wow, that sounds awesome. | ||
| And we're going to have a cop that planted drugs. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Do you have proof that he planted the drugs? | ||
| I know he planned the drugs. | ||
| He went to jail. | ||
| No, I don't think he's going to admit he planned the drugs, but he went to jail for it. | ||
| He went to jail for planting those drugs? | ||
| For corruption, you know, beating people, planting drugs, lying on police reports. | ||
| It was a habit. | ||
| That's how he was doing it. | ||
| Well, I mean, he made money, man. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's where the Rampart comes in. | ||
| I mean, for people who don't know, most police officers at this point in time believe that Suge Knight hired cops to kill Biggie Smalls. | ||
| And that they also, he probably also had Tupac killed. | ||
| And that he did it all under this Rampart division. | ||
| This Rampart division was working for him. | ||
| I mean, there's a huge Rolling Stone article about it. | ||
| It's fascinating, fascinating shit that the cops were so dirty That the cops were working with gang members. | ||
| They were working with murderers, working with criminals, and making money, clearly, profiting. | ||
| Well, you know, cops, man, they're just like everybody else, you know? | ||
| They lie, cheat, and all other things that the normal person go through in life. | ||
| So, I don't put nothing past them. | ||
| Especially when you start putting all that money on the table. | ||
| You know, I remember my first young guy who got arrested by him. | ||
| And they stole his money. | ||
| He was like 16 years old. | ||
| And he called me. | ||
| He was like, Rick, man, the cops just raided my house. | ||
| I was like, yeah, you alright? | ||
| And he was like, yeah, I'm cool. | ||
| I was like, what you have? | ||
| He's like, man, I had like $40,000. | ||
| I said, what happened? | ||
| He said, man, they asked me who money was, and I told him it wasn't mine. | ||
| They told me to go. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So when he got out, when I got with him, you know, we called the lawyer and told the lawyer, hey, man, it was $40,000 at that house, but wasn't no drug. | ||
| So he called, and they said, man, wasn't no money at that house. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's super common, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That happens all the time. | ||
| There's no one policing the police. | ||
| There's no one governing the government. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| You know, that's the real issue. | ||
| They got the guns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, not only that, they can change the laws. | ||
| I mean, we see what the fuck is going on now with this country. | ||
| It's like every week they come up with some new, even more restrictive, even more Orwellian law that gets through that allows them to tap your phones with no wire, with no warrants, rather. | ||
| You know, listening in on your phone calls, tap your fucking GPS systems, they can follow everywhere you go, and they can do all this shit without warrants now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, and they do it supposedly under the guise of terrorism, but it's really under the guise of making it easier for them to prosecute you for whatever the fuck they want to, because there's a goddamn business in locking people up in cages. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So that's what they're into. | ||
| So you find your loophole and then you chase after it. | ||
| You're in jail, right? | ||
| And then once you find this loophole... | ||
| I remember that day when I read it in the book, you know, it was like, man, it just like popped out at me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom! | |
| Go to jail, commit a crime, and get released. | ||
| I shot to the phone and I called my lawyer. | ||
| I said, man, I found it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So what happens then? | ||
| Well, it was discouraging what he said after he read it. | ||
| He didn't see it the same way I did. | ||
| Damn, you're a better lawyer than your fucking lawyer. | ||
| He graduated from Harvard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's hilarious. | |
| Wow. | ||
| I should get an honorary degree from Harvard or something. | ||
| Yeah, you should get a little something. | ||
| Yeah, so I just told him, or put it on the books, you know, then the judge went through her thing. | ||
| Oh, no, Mr. Ross, it's not the way you say it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, she must can't read. | |
| If she can't read that, she can't read. | ||
| So then the prosecutor went through his whole thing, but then I went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and they agreed with me totally, you know, said that if they did it the way they were saying do it, that they would lock up everybody would be career criminals on their first arrest. | ||
| Yeah, literally, everybody would be in life. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| A free man. | ||
| So, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, they agree with you. | ||
| They side with you. | ||
| You released immediately? | ||
| No, I had nine more years to do. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| Why nine more years? | ||
| Uh, that's just where it was. | ||
| You know, that's how much time I had left. | ||
| Okay, so you had 20 to life? | ||
| Because they cut me down. | ||
| No, no, I had a life, but they cut me down to 20. So the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cut you down to 20? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Okay, so at least you knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel then. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Oh, I was happy with that. | ||
| You were happy with that? | ||
| Yeah, I was going to lead a penitentiary because I was up at Lompoc Penitentiary, you know, USP Lompoc. | ||
| And what is that place like? | ||
| Oh, man, that's a dungeon, you know? | ||
| Everybody in there got 40 years or better. | ||
| You know, they mad at you up there if you got 20. You know, they got to get you out of there with 20 years. | ||
| You know, something might happen to you. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Man, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Those guys got 40 years. | |
| 20 years is freedom. | ||
| 20 years is you're almost free. | ||
| Yeah, you got to walk on eggshells around here. | ||
| If you have 20 years. | ||
| Man, you ain't got for 20 years. | ||
| You better go away from here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's how they talk to you. | ||
| They were like mad at you. | ||
| Oh, they'd be mad at you. | ||
| They're mad at you if you only got 20 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| If you got 30 years, they might be mad. | ||
| Goddamn, that's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hilarious and dark. | |
| I mean, you can get hurt. | ||
| You can get hurt there just because you got 20 years. | ||
| How did you stay out of danger? | ||
| Well, like I said, when I got my time cut, I only had to stay there like three more months, and I was out of there. | ||
| So it was easy for me, and, you know, I'm a well-liked guy, too. | ||
| You were in jail? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, they liked me. | ||
| How dangerous was the prison that you were in initially, the first prison before they moved you out? | ||
| Oh, man, I saw guys get hit in the head with iron mop ringers. | ||
| Iron what? | ||
| Mop ringers. | ||
| A mop ringer? | ||
| Which you ring the mop out with. | ||
| It's this great big old thing might weigh about 15, 20 pounds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, a guy sitting in his chair and a guy walks up behind him and just smashes his skull with it. | ||
| I mean, brutal, brutal, brutal, brutal sight. | ||
| I seen a guy get beat with a baseball bat, aluminum baseball bat, until his head was like mush. | ||
| They had to helicopter him out on the helicopter. | ||
| I think he had brain damage, though. | ||
| He didn't, you know, was a vegetable. | ||
| I've seen guys get stabbed, you know, while I'm taking a shower, you know, you hear this loud noise, like, just keep bumping up against the wall. | ||
| Boom, boom, boom, really violently, you know, and you know this is somebody's body, you know, like, why would somebody be hitting the wall this hard, you know? | ||
| And, uh, So I wrap my towel up and I look my head out at the shower and I see this guy and this guy stabbing him. | ||
| And so to get off the knife, he's just throwing his back and head and everything up against the wall trying to get away from the knife. | ||
| So it's really violent. | ||
| I mean, prison is really violent. | ||
| You know, you have to be careful, especially in the USPs. | ||
| You know, the USPs are dangerous too, but not as dangerous as USP because these guys don't have nothing to do. | ||
| What is a USP? US Penitentiary? | ||
| Yeah, US Penitentiary. | ||
| What is the difference? | ||
| Well, say for instance, an FCI, you can't have more than 20 years and be at an FCI. If you have more than 20 years- FCI stands for? | ||
| Federal Correctional Institution. | ||
| That's like a medium. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So if you have more than 20 years, you're going to go to a USP. Now, if you go to an FCI and you've got 20 years, but you keep getting into trouble, fights, and You know, something, maybe you stab somebody, then they're going to send you to a USP because they're like, okay, you go up here, these guys can handle stabbings. | ||
| So they'll boost you up. | ||
| Then they got what they call a low, it's for the guys who got like five years, six years, then you go to a low. | ||
| So they kind of keep it separated like that by your violence, by how much you get in trouble, things like that. | ||
| So the USP is the most dangerous. | ||
| That's the most. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Murderers, life sentences. | ||
| And then they have guys from all over the country. | ||
| Say for you in Washington, D.C. and you've been getting in trouble in Washington, D.C. Then they ship you down to California to keep you out of trouble. | ||
| You know, some of those guys from D.C. are really, really violent. | ||
| And what they do is they take all the baddest guys from all over the country and they put them in USPS. So you may have a thing where guys are fighting over territory, like the TV. You know, like the DC guys or the Philadelphia guys might say, man, we want to watch this program tonight. | ||
| The Philadelphia 76ers are playing, so we want to watch Philadelphia 76ers tonight because you're always watching the Lakers. | ||
| So that could cause a fight. | ||
| You know, it's kind of like territorial, you know, the way it works. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Did you get into any violent interactions in prison? | ||
| Oh, absolutely not. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| I stayed in the law library. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They don't come into law library and fight. | ||
| So that's how you avoided everything? | ||
| Most of the time. | ||
| The only time I really would put myself in Harm's way is when football season, you know, I played flag football with the guys, I played basketball with them, but I always had a mentality to defuse anything that ever happened. | ||
| I wouldn't fight, you know, if If somebody filed me hard on the basketball court, it was my fault because I put myself on the basketball court. | ||
| If I filed somebody hard on the basketball court, it was my fault because I filed him hard. | ||
| So I would always apologize to guys when I filed them hard. | ||
| But that's just the type of person I am. | ||
| When I play basketball, I don't mean to hurt anybody, but sometimes I do. | ||
| I filed a lot. | ||
| But, you know, I got along well. | ||
| You know, people respected me and I showed the utmost respect for everybody. | ||
| Did you have to align yourself with any groups in prison? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| Even though I am adopted by most groups. | ||
| You know, they adopt me. | ||
| Most groups? | ||
| Yeah, most of the groups in jail adopt me. | ||
| I mean, everybody. | ||
| You know, the Philadelphia guys, the Crips, the Bloods, the DCs. | ||
| I mean, I'm just cool with all of them, you know. | ||
| The only one probably is not is... | ||
| What's that? | ||
| The Serenios and the Aaron Brothers are probably the only two groups that... | ||
| But it's the Serenio's Mexicans? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then the Aryan brothers, obviously, KKK dudes. | ||
| Other than that, I got along. | ||
| And even they got along, you know, they would speak to me, you know. | ||
| Hey, Rick, what's happening? | ||
| But, you know, we don't hang out. | ||
| But they don't hang out with blacks. | ||
| Now, the day you got out of jail, man, what the fuck was that like? | ||
| The day you get out of 20 years and knowing that you got out, you know, on your own. | ||
| By the hair. | ||
| By the hair. | ||
| You know, it was luck. | ||
| When I was in prison, it was guys who had the same issue I had. | ||
| That didn't get out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That argued it almost the same way, you know. | ||
| Matter of fact, we're trying to get the guy who was the first guy to get a life sentence for selling crack. | ||
| We're trying to get his interview and his issue was almost identical to mine. | ||
| Just a little different though, but close. | ||
| And he's in for life? | ||
| He's in for life and he was only like 20 years old, 19 years old. | ||
| And it was the same situation? | ||
| They used the three strike rule on him? | ||
| They used the three strike rule on him, yeah. | ||
| But he didn't have three convictions? | ||
| His conviction is a little different, right? | ||
| He did have convictions. | ||
| His was he went to jail when he was 18 years old. | ||
| He got out. | ||
| And the same day he got out, he went right back on the block and started selling dope again. | ||
| And he got arrested that day. | ||
| So he wasn't convicted. | ||
| He wasn't convicted of the first one when he caught the second one, but they said it don't matter if you was convicted. | ||
| You had been to jail, so you should have learned your lesson, and you went back out and you did it again. | ||
| There's got to be a lot of that. | ||
| He was mad at me when I won. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and he's supposed to be my man, too. | ||
| He was mad. | ||
| Man, how you win? | ||
| I had the same issue. | ||
| I said, no, yours is a little different. | ||
| See, I never got out on mine. | ||
| See, on mine, they took me from LA, they took me to Texas, they took me to Ohio, took me to St. Louis, all before I ever got released. | ||
| I never got released. | ||
| Now, when you got out, what's the first shit you did? | ||
| You already know, man. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| I went and got me some, man. | ||
| Old girlfriends? | ||
| Yeah, no, no, a new girlfriend. | ||
| New girl? | ||
| Yeah, a new girl. | ||
| Did you know this girl? | ||
| Did girls contact you while you were in prison? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I got a lot of letters. | ||
| Because you were famous. | ||
| I was famous. | ||
| American Gangster, magazines. | ||
| And they knew you were coming out too. | ||
| As Is magazine, yeah. | ||
| They knew I was coming home. | ||
| They started to publicize that I had got a date. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Weren't you one of the first guys to use a social marketing website? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I'm the first prisoner to start a social network, freewayenterprise.com. | ||
| Y'all check it out too. | ||
| Right now I'm ranked like 100,000 in the U.S. Sometimes I go as low as 70,000. | ||
| I'm trying to break down to like 30,000 in the U.S. And it's called freewayenterprises.com? | ||
| Freewayenterprise.com. | ||
| And what is involved in this social network? | ||
| Well, what I do is I give people an outlet for their music, for their videos. | ||
| You know, like a lot of the sites now, they're charging to put their videos up. | ||
| And I don't. | ||
| They can put their pictures up. | ||
| They can meet friends and share music and share pictures and just different things, you know, that they do on social networks. | ||
| So I offer those services for them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you have any inside scoop on who killed Biggie? | |
| Man, somebody else asked me that. | ||
| The Rolling Stone article, they said the Rampart cops did it. | ||
| I don't have a clue. | ||
| I was at USP Lompoc when Biggie got killed. | ||
| I was disappointed that he came back to California. | ||
| I thought that was a little crazy with what had happened to Pac. | ||
| I knew that it wasn't safe for him to be out here in California because guys in California are very vengeful. | ||
| And when I heard that he was in California, I was like, what was he thinking about? | ||
| It's kind of crazy that musicians started killing each other. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, that had never existed. | ||
| We were just talking about this when we were in Atlanta this weekend. | ||
| They were the first musicians and artists, basically, that would start killing each other. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Has Tupac contacted you at all? | ||
| Uh, nah. | ||
| Not recently. | ||
| What are you asking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did Tupac contact him yet? | |
| No, he hasn't. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tupac? | |
| You mean the new hologram Tupac? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| People say Tupac's not dead. | ||
| Nobody says that. | ||
| That's not an idiot. | ||
| A lot of people do it. | ||
| Like, What's-His-Face just said it the other day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That big music executive. | |
| I'll tell you. | ||
| One second. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Yo, there's a photo of him on the autopsy table. | ||
| It's real simple. | ||
| Back in the days before they had Photoshop. | ||
| Tupac's dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
JFK. Yeah. | |
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| They killed that dude. | ||
| So how many people are a part of your freewayenterprise.com social media? | ||
| I think I got right around 16 to 20,000 members right now. | ||
| Oh, that's pretty cool. | ||
| Well, I'll guarantee you have more today. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I need them. | ||
| I need them. | ||
| Y'all sign up. | ||
| Help your boy out. | ||
| Yeah, sign up and also follow him on Twitter. | ||
| It's FreewayRicky on Twitter and check that out. | ||
| I got 40,000 followers on Twitter. | ||
| I'm doing pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's beautiful, man. | |
| I'm doing pretty good. | ||
| Yeah, you messaged me when you only had like eight. | ||
| I remember you messaged me like, how do I get more followers, man? | ||
| I'm like, I can't help you. | ||
| I'm trying man. | ||
| I'm learning all the social stuff, all the social media. | ||
| But I know they pay so much attention to... | ||
| Hold your boy in the background. | ||
| What are you asking me? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| His car. | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| His car is parked right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's fine. | |
| It's fine. | ||
| Oh, don't worry about it, man. | ||
| They don't do anything. | ||
| This is Pasadena, dude. | ||
| Nobody's ever put out more music after they're dead than Tupac, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hologram. | ||
| Yeah, that hologram was creepy. | ||
| You see that shit from Coachella? | ||
| Yeah, I heard about it. | ||
| I didn't see it, but I heard about it. | ||
| It looked like Tupac had been lifting weights. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, they had him all MMA'd out. | ||
| He was yoked. | ||
| He looked like George St. Pierre. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was ridiculous. | |
| Seriously, he had a six-pack. | ||
| It was way more muscular than the regular Tupac. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| It was like Tupac had just been doing kettlebells and CrossFit and shit. | ||
| These record labels are getting away with... | ||
| They don't care who wins the war. | ||
| They got both of them covered, Biggie and Pac. | ||
| Now, record labels nowadays, they're fucked. | ||
| They have to make a percentage of the artists that are out there performing live, right? | ||
| How do they make money now? | ||
| Yeah, they do the 360 deals. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Well, they get a percentage of everything you do. | ||
| If you do a commercial on TV, they get a piece of it. | ||
| If you do a concert, they get a piece of it. | ||
| If you get a tennis shoe endorsement, they want a piece of it. | ||
| They didn't used to do that? | ||
| No, they didn't. | ||
| They used to just be strictly music. | ||
| And did they always get a piece of the live performance? | ||
| Now they do. | ||
| But they didn't always? | ||
| No, uh-uh. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So this is all post-MP3 world? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| The performance used to be all artists' money. | ||
| What is the benefit of having a music company? | ||
| Now, it seems like with the internet, it would almost be a hindrance to be involved. | ||
| Well, marketing. | ||
| Marketing. | ||
| Marketing dollars. | ||
| Because, you know, people believe what they see and hear. | ||
| But once you get to a point like a Jay-Z or somewhere... | ||
| But he's already in the contract, so he can't get out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| But what I was saying is, if he started his own shit and started helping people... | ||
| Promote themselves. | ||
| Like, he starts promoting people. | ||
| You could enable people to become famous on their own. | ||
| Yeah, you think Jay-Z wants to help people? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think that it sounds logical. | ||
| If someone explained to him how much better his own life would be if he helped other people's lives and it makes you actually feel better, yeah, he'd probably try it. | ||
| But it's hard to sink that into people's heads. | ||
| Everybody's so fucking competitive. | ||
| Yeah, everybody wants to just get all the money and hog it for themselves. | ||
| And they don't understand that someone else's success does not equal a failure for you. | ||
| It's not like success that was yours and you didn't get it. | ||
| This guy got it. | ||
| It's not like there's only a certain amount of gold out there and you're telling people where the gold's at and they're like, damn, that could have been my fucking gold. | ||
| No, I mean, someone else's success has nothing to do with you. | ||
| That's a whole new human being. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. |
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