ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, October 21, 1996 TAG: 9610210132
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
A firestorm of controversy has followed a report in late August by the San Jose Mercury News that a Nicaraguan drug network with ties to the CIA-backed Contra rebels allegedly opened the first cocaine pipeline to the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles. These Nicaraguans are said to have provided tons of cocaine for a decade to a South-Central Los Angeles dealer named ``Freeway'' Ricky Ross. Ross purportedly funneled his supply to the Bloods and Crips gangs, generating the cash that paid for their automatic weapons and catapulted the crack crisis across urban America.
The notions of government and gang involvement in the drug trade have revived the long-running debate over the roots of South-Central's painful clash with cocaine. The allegations have bolstered suspicions of a genocidal conspiracy.
For many blacks, such a scenario is within the realm of belief. It appears to help explain how the plague of crack infected a community that had neither the resources nor machinery to import cocaine. It also fits into a pattern of official discrimination and disregard still felt to a degree that many whites don't comprehend.
The story of crack's genesis and evolution, however, does not follow a simple, linear path. It is filled with ruthless billionaires and strung-out curb dealers who operate in a world of shifting alliances and fleeting fortunes.
Although it's unclear what, if anything, the U.S. government may have known about this trade, a few truths are clear:
* Cocaine was flowing from Colombia into Los Angeles long before the Nicaraguan traffickers arrived on the scene - Oscar Danilo Blandon, the Nicaragua ring's Los Angeles point man, was not ``the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California,'' as the Mercury News contended. South-Central drug dealers manufactured it, not Nicaraguans.
* There is no evidence that any significant drug profits from the Nicaraguan ring were pumped back to the Contras - less than $50,000 went to the rebel cause, according to a Contra supporter and a business partner who sold drugs with Blandon.
* Nor did crack sales fill the coffers of the Bloods and Crips, although individual members profited. Most experts consider the gangs too disorganized and preoccupied with their own rivalries to function as efficient criminal enterprises.
Ross was determined to rise to the highest echelons of the drug world with or without the help of his Nicaraguan sources. According to interviews and court testimony, he was an established crack retailer before meeting Blandon in 1983 or 1984, when, Blandon said, his own tenuous links to the Nicaraguan anti-Sandinista resistance already had been severed.
``This was not some grand design of the drug cartels or someone at CIA headquarters in Langley, [Va.], who was sitting around thinking up ways to raise money for the Contras,'' said University of California, Los Angeles Professor Ronald Siegel, who did some of the nation's first research on smoking cocaine.
Rather, the rise of crack was driven by a broad array of factors - a worldwide glut of powder cocaine, shifting tastes among addicts and the entrepreneurial moxie of the inner-city hustlers who marketed it.
For Colombian smuggling cartels, crack opened up a new market for exporting huge quantities of cocaine while prices were plummeting. For users, crack offered a swifter, more intense high than snorting the drug, and at a unit price - about $20 - that seemed more affordable than it really was. In the street-level retailers, crack created a new subclass of outlaw capitalists.
``The crack cocaine market was highly decentralized, involving primarily free-lance distributors,'' according to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration report on the history of crack. The trade, it added, was ``open to any person with access to cocaine and a desire to distribute.''
Crack was breaking out in New York, Washington, Miami and Los Angeles at almost exactly the same time in the early 1980s. In the East, it was spread by a slew of independent contractors, often organized along ethnic lines, including Jamaicans, Dominicans and Haitians with direct ties to the Colombian cartels.
In the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the competition was equally fierce. Although Ross was a dominant figure, he still had to jostle with drug lords who came on the scene either before Ross or at the same time.
Ross was still big enough that Los Angeles authorities in 1986 formed the ``Freeway Rick Task Force,'' which contributed to his reputation as crack's leading entrepreneur. But even members of that squad acknowledge they could have picked any number of targets.
At the Mercury News, Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos now acknowledges that he is unsure whether Ross' Nicaraguan ring was the first to bring cocaine to Los Angeles' black neighborhoods. But Ceppos said he continues to believe it was the first to import the drug in ``huge masses'' that ``people in South-Central could afford.''
Today, as Ross awaits sentencing on cocaine conspiracy charges, he paints himself as a victim - created and betrayed by Blandon, who himself was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1992 and then helped the government snare his old customer in a sting.
If Ross can prove that the CIA or the Contras behaved worse than he did, he may be able to persuade a U.S. District Court judge to spare him from a life in jail.
In recent court appearances, including the March trial in which Ross was convicted on cocaine conspiracy charges, Blandon testified that he began selling cocaine in 1982 at the suggestion of Norvin Meneses, a San Francisco Bay area drug dealer and Contra sympathizer.
However, Blandon said, by the end of 1982 he had decided that the Contras were getting enough money from the Reagan administration and no longer needed his help. So, Blandon began pocketing the money.
About a year later, Blandon said, he met Ross. Although Ross had become a millionaire by 1984 - one of the first to make his fortune solely on crack - the market was so huge by then that even a dealer of his stature could seem dwarfed.
``Even on the best day Ricky Ross had, there was way more crack cocaine out there than he ever could control,'' said Lt. Ernie Halcon, a narcotics detective in the Los Angeles suburb of San Fernando.
An entrenched, highly efficient distribution network run by Colombians already was in place before Blandon or Ross entered the drug trade.
``If there was cocaine being brokered by Nicaraguans, it was not much,'' said a former top DEA official in Los Angeles. ``All the people we saw were Colombians, Colombians, Colombians.''
Jim Brown, the former National Football League star, has seen the gang-cocaine story unfold from a ringside seat. Through Amer-I-Can Inc., Brown's self-help program, he has worked to keep some of Los Angeles' toughest characters in line.
Brown insists that neither the CIA nor the Contras have much relevance to the crack cocaine trade. The drug business, he believes, is ruled by its own economic logic; it preys on social conditions that continue to fester, regardless of any elaborate schemes.
``We need to deal with that reality,'' Brown said. ``People are still hungry - and all this CIA-Contra stuff ain't going to feed them.''
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