"Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross was the leader of [[South Central Los Angeles|South Central L.A.]]'s first major [[Crack Cocaine|crack]] distribution network.[^2] In the space of four years, Ross went from selling fractions of an ounce of [[cocaine]] to shipping multimillion-dollar shipments across [[United States|America]].[^2] His primary supplier was [[Danilo Blandon|Danilo Blandón]], a [[Nicaragua|Nicaraguan]] trafficker who had sold cocaine to fund the [[Contras]] during the early 1980s.[^1] ### Early Life Ross grew up in South Central L.A., where his family had lived since the early 1960s. His father, Sonny, an oil tank cleaner by trade, left home while Ross was still a small child in Tyler, [[Texas]], in 1963. His mother, Annie, a heavyset woman with bottle-thick glasses, worked as a janitor in downtown office buildings and was strict, always checking up on Ross and his older brother David, snooping in their rooms to make sure they weren't getting into trouble. When she was at work, her younger sister Luetha Wilson watched the boys. Since childhood, Ross was taking things apart and putting them back together, and began driving tractors on his uncle's farm in Overton, Texas, during summer visits.[^3] ### Tennis and Education Ross was too small for football or basketball but had quick reflexes. Two family friends, Dr. Mal Bouquet and Richard Williams, encouraged him to take up tennis when he was about eleven or twelve. "They picked me up, took me to tennis tournaments. They took care of my racquets and tennis shoes, stuff like that," Ross said. The tournaments and practices kept him out of the 74 Hoover Crips, his neighborhood gang. He was friends with many of them but was never a gang member himself. A 1993 letter from the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix stated: "There exists no information to substantiate your membership in the Los Angeles based 'Crips' street gang. All information in your file has been deleted which reflected gang participation or membership." L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz, who spent months interviewing Ross in 1994, observed: "He does not have the culture of a gang member when you talk to him. He doesn't have the attitude... I mean, he was a capitalist."[^3] At Dorsey High School, Ross made All-League his first year, All-City second team as a sophomore, and All-City first team his senior year. His goal was to play tennis for a major university, and coaches were grooming about five players on his team for college scholarships. But Ross had a critical problem: by his senior year, he still couldn't read or write. "My teachers just passed me, gave me C's and let me go through," Ross said. It only mattered when he started practicing with the Long Beach State University tennis team after beating one of their players in a tournament. Once the coach discovered his academic situation, the university's interest ended. Disillusioned, Ross dropped out of Dorsey, a few credits short of graduation. "I didn't graduate. I made it to the 12th grade and I was a few credits from being able to graduate." On July 7, 1978, he was arrested by the LAPD for burglary and disorderly conduct, though the charges were dismissed.[^3] ### Introduction to Cocaine After leaving high school, Ross attended the Venice Skills Center to study auto repair, then was recruited by coach Pete Brown to play tennis at L.A. Trade Tech Junior College. He was studying bookbinding, ironically, for the illiterate Ross. At Trade Tech, Ross grew close to Mr. Fisher, an auto upholstery teacher and sometime tennis partner who lived in Baldwin Hills, drove a new Cadillac, and wore nice jewelry. Ross adopted Fisher as a father figure.[^3] In 1981, Ross discovered why Fisher could afford such a lifestyle on a teacher's salary. "We had a conversation one day. I found out that he was dealing and also using narcotics," Ross said. Fisher showed him a piece of cocaine "about as big as a matchhead" and told him "this right here is worth $50 and you can sell this and it just keeps getting better and better." Ross discussed it with his running partner [[Ollie Newell]], who had just gotten out of jail and needed money. Newell encouraged him: "Come on, man, you can do it, you don't mess around with nothing, you don't smoke, you don't drink, you're clean, you can handle it." Ross made one reservation: he would never use his own product.[^3] ### First Drug Deals Their first deal was a disaster. Fisher gave them "a fifty-dollar piece" and "we got beat out of it," Ross said. They regrouped, stole a car from Bret Harte Junior High's parking lot, and sold the wheels for $250. They returned to Fisher and bought "what's called an 8-track of cocaine" — three grams, heavily cut, for $250. They cut it further and sold it for about $600. "An awful lot of money." Instead of spending the profits, they reinvested. "Sold it, made more money," Ross said. "I didn't really know the game. It was like we were just stumbling through, you know what I'm saying? Picking up as we go."[^3] Ross sold while Newell provided protection. They kept earnings small to avoid police attention: "We never wanted to get over two or three hundred dollars." Acquaintances selling PCP ("Sherm" or "water") mocked them for choosing cocaine, which had a much smaller market. Ross preferred it: "Cocaine is like, mellow, and it was cool. So I didn't mind doing it." On March 19, 1982, Ross was arrested for grand theft auto after police found a Mercedes in his garage with mismatched parts. He hired Beverly Hills attorney [[Alan Fenster]], who got the charge dismissed.[^3] ### Ivan as Supplier Fisher grew uncomfortable with the volume Ross and Newell were ordering. "Mr. Fisher was working so he told me to go ahead and deal directly with Ivan," Ross said. "Ivan," a handsome, smiling Latino who had been supplying Fisher, offered to be their direct supplier at a better price. Under Ivan, "we went from moving grams to moving ounces." The same product Fisher sold them for $200 now yielded $900, because Fisher had been skimming $50-$75 per transaction. Ross reinvested the savings into larger orders, getting volume breaks, then cutting street prices further.[^3] L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz observed: "He kept incrementally expanding his quantity, and every time he could do that, he was bringing the price down just a little bit more, and then what he would gain from volume, he would put right back into the operation. It was just classic economics. And he saw all this in a way I guess others didn't, or weren't as disciplined as him to act on." The discipline was partly enforced by their mothers: both Newell and Ross hid their money and purchases from their strict mothers. When Annie Ross finally discovered what was happening, she threw both of them out.[^3] Ross said: "You know how some people feel that God put them down here to be a preacher? I felt that he had put me down to be the cocaine man." He began converting PCP dealers into cocaine dealers, as they saw customers leaving with hundred-dollar bills instead of five- and ten-dollar purchases.[^3] After eight months with Ivan, their supplier disappeared. "Something happened to Ivan," Ross said. They panicked. From afar, Danilo Blandón watched events unfold. It was time for him to make his move.[^3] ### Relationship with Danilo Blandón Blandón was Ross's sole connection to wholesale cocaine after Ivan's disappearance: "Everybody I knew, I knew through him. So really, he could be considered as my only source. In a sense, he was."[^1] Ross described Blandón as "almost like a godfather to me. He's the one who got me going."[^1] Ross had no knowledge of Blandón's political connections. When [[Gary Webb]] informed him that Blandón had been selling cocaine to help the Contras buy weapons and supplies, Ross reacted with disbelief: "And they put me in jail? I'd say that was some fucked-up shit there. They say I sold dope all over, but man, I know he done sold ten times more than me. Are you being straight with me?"[^1] Ross concluded: "He's been working for the government the whole damn time."[^1] ### Empire at Its Zenith During 1984 and 1985, the Ross-Blandón cocaine trafficking empire reached its peak. Ross was selling cocaine so rapidly he stopped converting it to crack himself, instead passing Blandón's kilos directly to smaller crack manufacturers, increasingly members of various [[Crips]] sets from across Los Angeles. Blandón confirmed that Ross was buying 100 kilos per week: "It continued growing, growing, growing, until sometime he buy [from] me 100 a week." Blandón arranged with Colombian suppliers to give Ross cocaine on credit—the initial advance of 20 to 25 kilos was worth approximately $1 million wholesale.[^5] Ross estimated his average volume at approximately 150 kilos per week, enough to produce roughly 3,000,000 doses of crack every seven days. Blandón and the [[Torres Brothers]] were sometimes sharing approximately $5.7 million per week in cash from Ross. "Sometimes, we'd spend $4 million or $5 million a week with that guy, in our hell days," Ross said. Ross used a South Central apartment as a countinghouse, where drug money was brought, sorted, and wrapped using two or three counting machines running day and night. "Man, my fingers hurt!" Ross told Blandón. "We got to the point where it was like, 'Man, we don't want to count no more money.'"[^5] ### Diversification of Suppliers When Blandón became increasingly unreliable—drinking heavily and reluctant to leave his Rialto home—Ross turned to the Torres Brothers, Nicaraguan traffickers who had previously worked for Blandón. Ross used the competition to drive down prices from both suppliers, whipsawing each against the other. Blandón acknowledged that Ross "got the coke from me, from Torres. . .I got a piece of the apple." The rivalry between Blandón and the Torres brothers eventually turned bitter and dangerous.[^5] Ross had initially been reluctant to find other suppliers, recognizing how much of his success depended on Blandón: "If Danilo had disappeared, we wouldn't have been getting no ounces, no nothing. . .When we got started, if we wouldn't have had him, we wouldn't have been able to have found it nowhere else." Blandón's prices—$38,000 per kilo when others charged $45,000—and his steady supply made him difficult to replace. Blandón also provided Ross with advance warnings of police raids on his stash houses.[^5] ### Real Estate and Front Businesses Following Blandón's advice to invest drug profits, Ross purchased houses, apartment buildings, an auto parts store, and a hotel near the Harbor Freeway called the Freeway Motor Inn, which gave him his nickname "Freeway Rick." The motel served as a secure meeting place for dealers and couriers. The auto parts store—called the "Big Palace of Wheels"—was a well-stocked but curiously customer-free front corporation.[^5] ### Weapons Acquisition Beginning in 1984, Blandón supplied Ross and his associates with high-powered weapons through [[Ronald Lister]] and the [[Mundy Security Group]]. Ross's first gun was a .22 pistol with a silencer, given to him free by Blandón. "Everybody that worked with me—everybody—bought a gun from him." Ross bought a silver-plated Uzi submachine gun, and his partner Ollie Newell became one of Blandón's biggest arms customers, eventually possessing enough firepower to equip a platoon, including a tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun capable of downing small planes. Ross said his crew acquired more than a hundred guns from Blandón.[^5] ### National Expansion As the South Central crack market became saturated, Ross's gang customers started traveling to other California cities and then nationwide, setting up new crack markets using their connections with Ross to supply them. This migration marked the start of an unprecedented cross-country expansion by the Crips and later the Bloods. The Los Angeles Times described Ross's operation as "a coast-to-coast conglomerate that sold more than 500,000 nuggets of the drug every day." One L.A. narcotics detective described it as "a cartel."[^5] Ross was selling to nearly every big crack dealer in Los Angeles without resorting to attention-getting violence. "The dollar was a powerful persuader," Ross discovered. "There was no limit to the average cocaine dealer's greed. You could buy your way into anything, or out of any disagreement." His distribution system used nondescript decoy cars and load cars, walkie-talkies, stash houses, cash houses, and safe houses—a system that took him two years to perfect.[^5] ### Identified by Law Enforcement In August 1986, the flipped Torres brothers told detective [[Jerry Guzzetta]] during debriefings that two Black dealers controlled the entire South Central [[Los Angeles]] cocaine market. Guzzetta's "Project Sahara" report identified them as "Rick and Ollie"—[[Ricky Ross|Ross]] and Ollie Newell—generating "a conservative figure of approximately $10 million dollars a month." The brothers reported the two dealers had established a direct pipeline to the Colombian cartels. This intelligence was passed to the [[LASD Major Violators]] squad and Detective [[Thomas Gordon]], who realized the L.A. crack market was far more disciplined and well organized than anyone had dreamed. Ross confirmed that Blandón had an uncanny ability to accurately predict upcoming police raids but said he was never able to explain Blandón's clairvoyance.[^6] Jerry Guzzetta drove through South Central with the Torres brothers, who showed him Ross's operations: a vacant apartment complex used as a cocaine lab, a multistory distribution center near the Harbor Freeway, and the Freeway Motor Inn—which the brothers said Rick had built to his specifications for a million dollars, with his mother Annie working the front desk. Guzzetta realized they had led him to "the legendary Freeway Rick." Ross surmised the Torres brothers gave him up because he had reverted to buying exclusively from Blandón: "Danilo's price was so low, that the Torres brothers simply could not continue to compete." Majors I had been looking for Ross since April 1986, raiding his girlfriend's apartment on May 15 and rousted his cousins in late August—telling them to warn Rick to watch himself.[^7] ### The Godfather of South Central By 1986-87, Ross had become too successful to hide. He and Ollie Newell sat down one day and counted up the money stashed in their apartment. By the time they were finished, Ross said, they were looking at $2.8 million "sitting on the floor, wrapped up in rubber bands," the haul from just one house. They had cash in apartments all over Los Angeles. "All of his locations had these big, huge solid steel floor safes," said Sergeant [[Robert Sobel]]. "We had to call a locksmith to get him to drill the things." Ross began acting like the Godfather he had seen in the movies, buying favors and respect throughout South Central: hoops and backboards for parks, field lights, uniforms for local teams, turntables for rap artists, eggs for the Easter egg hunt, pews and an air conditioner for his mother's church, a semipro football team. Any panhandler who bumped into Freeway Rick walked away with a wad of bills. L.A. television ran a special report titled Ricky Ross, Gang Godfather.[^8] ### Freeway Rick Task Force On January 12, 1987, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and [[LAPD]] formally joined forces to create the Freeway Rick Task Force, one of the few times in L.A. law enforcement history that a single man was the target of a multi-jurisdictional police squad. Led by Sergeant Robert Sobel of Majors I, with detective [[Steve Polak]] among the nine assigned detectives, the task force maintained twenty-four-hour surveillance. "We just dedicated seven days a week on him," Polak said, "and we just dogged him until he couldn't take it anymore."[^8] The task force raided the Freeway Motor Inn and Ross's mother's house on January 21, 1987. By late January they had served fifteen search warrants, arrested five people, and seized nearly eight pounds of cocaine worth $1.3 million, $63,122 in cash, and twenty guns. The tactics escalated: detectives beat Ollie Newell, smothering him with a plastic bag, and took $30,000 from his friend Robert Robertson. They ransacked Ross's rental properties, breaking furniture and kicking holes in walls. Ross's attorney Alan Fenster filed formal complaints accusing the officers of beatings, thefts, property destruction, and false arrests; the complaints were dismissed.[^8] ### Frame-Up and Dismissal In mid-April 1987, Ross spotted unmarked cars following him and fled on foot. Shots were fired behind him. Ollie Newell and Cornell Ward were handcuffed and beaten with metal flashlights and leather saps. Then detective Steve Polak drove up, opened his trunk, and "retrieved a kilo of cocaine in a black gym bag," displaying it to the others and claiming Ross had dropped it while running. Ross was charged with conspiracy, transporting controlled substances, and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, and was declared a fugitive.[^8] Ross turned himself in on May 5, 1987, locked up on $1 million bond. The LAPD issued a press release announcing the demise of his "multi-million dollar mid-level rock cocaine organization." But task force members visited Ross in jail and, on a tape recording, discussed their frame-up of him and tried to turn him against his Colombian source. "The discussion was tape recorded," Justice Department records state. A forensic expert found eleven erasures on the tape, attempts to obliterate discussions of a beating administered to Ross's brother David. After hearing the tape, the judge threw all charges out of court. Ross was freed.[^8] ### Scaling Back After Blandón moved to Miami, Ross continued calling him to place orders, while [[Roger Sandino]]'s partner Jose Gonzalez handled pickups and deliveries. But Ross was having second thoughts. His girlfriend Mary Louise Bronner, mother of two of his children, had become a crack addict. "At first, I had never saw anybody addicted to cocaine. It took a while before it started to affect anybody that we dealt with," Ross said. The L.A. crack market was also saturated; kilos that once cost $50,000 were now going for $12,000.[^8] Ross started scaling back, turning operations over to Ollie Newell, Mike Smith, and Cornell Ward. "I had slowed down on my drug activity tremendously. I might have been selling once a week to maybe one or two people. They would call me and say that they needed something, and I would call Mr. Blandón and get it and give it to them. So it was hard for the police to catch me doing something because I was barely doing anything. You know, they thought I was still going full bore, but I wasn't." After the charges were dismissed, Ross decided to give the task force no third shot. "Someone else could be the crack king from now on."[^8] ### Cincinnati Ross moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, with Mary Bronner and their children, taking $300,000 in cash and settling in a townhouse in a comfortable Republican suburb of Hamilton County. He indulged his obsession with real estate, buying and renovating old houses. "I was buying property, old houses, rebuilding them. . .I had become pretty knowledgeable on how to rebuild houses." Ross was twenty-seven years old and beginning to feel at ease. "Hook at myself now and say, 'Man, you had it made.'"[^9] Blandón called from Miami, dropping hints about cheap cocaine. Ross had checked prices in Cincinnati and found kilos selling for $50,000, compared to $12,000 in L.A. "Ounces were like $2,400. It was like when I first started." When Blandón called from Detroit in the fall of 1987 and offered fifteen kilos at a good price, Ross accepted. "I told him to bring them to me. I'll take them." He was back in play.[^9] Ross expanded methodically, first into Lincoln Heights, then Over-the-Rhine, Avondale, Mt. Airy, Bond Hill, St. Bernard, Lockland, and Walnut Hills, using the same marketing techniques from L.A.: free cocaine, smoke parties, volume discounts. "I knew the recipe. It's just like it was in L.A. If you want to get in with the blacks, you find out who the shot-caller is. And you talk to him and you get him on your side." Once operations were running, Ross called L.A. and invited friends to staff them. "The recruits were given apartments, beepers, cocaine, and instructions on how to conduct street sales," the Justice Department Inspector General reported. "Most of these people were members of gangs, most notably the Crips." Suddenly Cincinnati had two problems it had never had before: Crips and crack.[^9] Ross did not limit himself to Cincinnati. His dope turned up in Toledo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Atlanta, Texas, and as far away as Seattle, where police viewed his ring as "the single most important group distributing crack cocaine in the Seattle-Tacoma area." In ten months, Ross said, he sold 300 or 400 kilos of Blandón's cocaine in the Midwest, netting around $2 million. He flew to Miami once a month to drop off cash, and met with Blandón and a Colombian named Tony in New York City to place orders. At other times, his L.A. friends stuck dope on a Greyhound bus.[^9] ### The Greyhound Bust In September 1988, a drug-sniffing dog in New Mexico alerted on an eastbound Greyhound luggage compartment. Inside was a suitcase carrying nine kilos of cocaine worth $100,000, tagged for Cincinnati. The DEA let it through and staked out the bus station. A young L.A. Crip named Alphonso Jeffries claimed the suitcase and sprang the trap. Ross promised to pay all legal bills if Jeffries kept quiet. Jeffries did, and received a twenty-year federal sentence with no parole.[^9] The bust led the FBI and DEA to investigate whether the Crips were flooding Cincinnati with inexpensive cocaine. Ross knew it was only a matter of time. He sold what he had and returned to L.A. in the fall of 1988, going into the home improvement business, spraying acoustic ceilings and painting.[^9] ### Federal Indictments and Arrest A grand jury in Smith County, Texas, indicted Ross on cocaine conspiracy charges after he discussed a deal with cousins on a monitored line in May 1988. After a CBS program reported he was under investigation in Cincinnati and Texas, Blandón stopped calling. In June 1989, Ross and thirteen others were indicted on federal cocaine conspiracy charges in Cincinnati. Alphonso Jeffries had broken, telling police about Ross's trips to New York and California to pick up cocaine.[^9] In late November, Ross was pouring concrete at an apartment building when narcotics officers arrived. He ran and they shot at him twelve times. He barricaded himself inside a house and called Alan Fenster. A SWAT team arrived with a dog. After Ross surrendered and was handcuffed, officers beat him with flashlights, breaking one on his head, then clubbed him with a fifteen-pound frying pan and kicked him repeatedly. Ross was taken to a hospital and charged with assault on a police officer; the police claimed he had attacked them. He was dumped into a cell at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Correctional Center to await extradition.[^9] ### Freeway Academy Ross was released from federal prison in August 1993 after learning to read and write, obtaining his high school equivalency certificate, and becoming a devotee of self-help guru Anthony Robbins. He returned to South Central and pursued his dream of restoring the 40,000-square-foot Adams Street Theater at Adams and Crenshaw boulevards into the Freeway Academy, a youth center with a gymnasium, classrooms, recording studios, and a performance hall. "One of the times I had met Danilo in New York I had went to the Apollo Theater and I saw what they was doing there, and I said that this would be a perfect idea for Los Angeles," Ross said.[^10] The project gained national media attention. The Los Angeles Times published a profile headlined "Ex-Drug Dealer Out to Stage Turnaround." ABC News' Day One called Ross "one of America's most powerful drug dealers." Community group 100 Black Men held a dinner in his honor attended by Magic Johnson, Ice Cube, and Snoop Doggy Dogg. "I was like on just another type of high," Ross said. "I was going to churches and doing speeches." But the project was out of money. Ross had borrowed $30,000 from [[Leroy Brown|"Chico" Brown]] for a recording studio. He pleaded guilty to the pending Texas charges and reentered prison in December 1993, serving ten months before release in August 1994. He had $57 to his name.[^10] ### Rearrest and DEA Sting After his release from Texas prison, Ross worked for Wolf River Development Corp., cleaning repossessed houses. Blandón called from Nicaragua the day Ross returned to L.A., and [[Chepita Blandon|Chepita]] called inviting him to dinner and pressuring him to find someone to sell drugs. Ross refused: "I told her no. I didn't know nobody. I'd just gotten out of jail." Blandón kept paging him constantly. Ross's probation officer James Galipeau said he was driving Ross to a speech when the pager went off: "This guy won't leave me alone. I mean, the son-of-a-bitch called him while he was in the car with his probation officer!"[^10] In February 1995, "Chico" Brown proposed a solution to their mutual problems: he would put up money for a drug deal with Blandón, using friends from Baltimore. If the deal went through, Brown would forgive the $30,000 debt and pay Ross $70,000. Ross agreed to make the introduction. On March 2, 1995, at the Bonita Plaza Mall in Chula Vista, Brown handed $169,445 to Blandón's Colombian associate, and Ross's friend Michael McLaurin drove away in a Chevy Blazer containing 100 kilos of cocaine. The [[DEA]] had booby-trapped the vehicle with a kill switch. Federal agents swarmed the parking lot. Ross fled on foot but was captured minutes later. He had been a free man six months.[^10] Ross's brother David called it entrapment: "They set him up and he evidently fell for it." L.A. Times reporter Jesse Katz said the DEA's motive was simple: "To fuck with him. If the government decides to fuck with you and you take the bait, you are automatically fucked." Former detective Steve Polak crowed to Katz: "I had no doubt that he was going to fall again. I just didn't know it was going to be this soon."[^10] ### Conviction Two weeks after his arrest, a federal grand jury indicted Ross, "Chico" Brown, Curtis James, and Michael McLaurin on conspiracy charges. Ross was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1996 and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Brown pleaded guilty and received an eleven-year sentence. Ollie Newell had been convicted of drug charges in [[Indiana]] in the late 1980s and released from prison in 1997.[^2] ### Investigation Meetings with Webb In late September 1995, Webb visited Ross at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown [[San Diego]], where Ross was being held without bail pending trial. Ross appeared confident at first but dropped the pretense by the end. "I can't believe he done me like this," Ross said of Blandón's betrayal. When Webb explained that Blandón had been arrested with no drugs and faced only taped conversations with informants, Ross was incredulous: "They didn't find no dope on him? Then what would he roll over for? Think about it. You ain't gonna pull a life sentence just for talking to somebody about selling dope." Ross concluded that someone was not telling Webb the whole story.[^11] ### The Trial Ross's federal trial began in March 1996 in San Diego before Judge [[Marilyn Huff]]. Prosecutor [[LJ Oneale]] filed a motion to prevent any mention of the CIA at trial, writing: "This matter, if true, would be classified." Defense attorney Alan Fenster fought to obtain government records about Blandón's Contra connections but was repeatedly denied. Blandón testified for the prosecution, admitting that [[Norwin Meneses|Meneses]] had recruited him to sell cocaine for the Contras but claiming variously that he stopped in 1983, 1984, or 1982. Government documents showed Blandón was still selling cocaine for the Contras through 1986.[^12] Ross was convicted of cocaine trafficking in the spring of 1996. Juror Norman Brown said: "None of us liked Blandón. A few of the jurors were very upset that he is used by law enforcement." Another juror said: "Blandón made us all so angry that we would use that kind of sleazeball. We wanted to acquit Ricky Ross just to give the message to the government that we disagreed with the use of Blandón." Ross was sentenced to life without parole, later reduced by a federal appeals court to twenty years to life. At sentencing, Fenster asked for a postponement, citing the Dark Alliance series, and Judge Marilyn Huff told prosecutor LJ Oneale she wanted answers from the CIA before passing sentence.[^13] "Chico" Brown pleaded guilty and received an eleven-year sentence. Ollie Newell had been convicted of drug charges in Indiana in the late 1980s and released from prison in 1997.[^2] ### Footnotes [^1]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Prologue: "It was like they didn't want to know" [^2]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Cast of Characters [^3]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 7: "Something happened to Ivan" [^4]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 8: "A million hits is not enough" [^5]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 10: "Teach a man a craft and he's liable to practice it" [^6]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 14: "It's bigger than I can handle" [^7]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 16: "It's a burn" [^8]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 20: "It is a sensitive matter" [^9]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 21: "I could go anywhere in the world and sell dope" [^11]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 25: "Things are moving all around us" [^12]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 26: "That matter, if true, would be classified" [^13]: Gary Webb, *Dark Alliance*, Chapter 27: "A very difficult decision"