Meet Gary Webb, the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist who committed suicide in the wake of the public tar-and-feathering (and financial impoverishment) he endured as his reward for bringing Ross and his exploits to the attention of our great nation:
Wow, it sounds like he got railed by the Reagan administration because he uncovered and reported that the govt. was shielding inner city drug dealers as a way to protect funding for Nicaraguan contras after Congress outlawed direct funding of the contras. That's pretty crazy.
More directly he got railed by his own employer -- the once highly respected San Jose Mercury News -- who was getting railed by conservative punditocracy (which at the time included the Reagan administration as a proper subset).
I read, "Webb investigated Nicaraguans linked to the CIA-backed Contras who had smuggled cocaine into the U.S. Their smuggled cocaine was distributed as crack cocaine in Los Angeles, with the profits funneled back to the Contras.".
So I guess there wasn't enough cocaine being flooded into this country from Columbia; we needed a complex plot involving the CIA, the Contras, the Nicaraguans, Los Angeles and a supremely risky money laundering scheme operating in reverse.
Did you bother to read the wikipedia link I was commenting on? I've pasted the relevant part below.
According to Webb, the CIA was aware of the cocaine transactions and the large shipments of drugs into the U.S. by Contra personnel. Webb charged that the Reagan administration shielded inner-city drug dealers from prosecution in order to raise money for the Contras, especially after Congress passed the Boland Amendment, which prohibited direct Contra funding.
Webb's reporting generated fierce controversy, and the San Jose Mercury News backed away from the story, effectively ending Webb's career as a mainstream media journalist. In 2004, Webb was found dead from two gunshot wounds to the head, which the coroner's office judged a suicide. Though he was criticized and outcast from the mainstream journalism community, his reportage was eventually vindicated as many of his findings have since been validated: since Webb's death, both the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune have defended his "Dark Alliance" series. Journalist George Sanchez states that "the CIA's internal investigation by Inspector General Frederick Hitz vindicated much of Gary's reporting and observes that despite the campaign against Webb, "the government eventually admitted to more than Gary had initially reported" over the years.[1][better source needed]
Damn, ".. Webb was found dead from two gunshot wounds to the head, which the coroner's office judged a suicide." Two self inflicted shots to the head sounds intense.
That made me double-take. That people accept it at face-value as a suicide seems a little bizarre to me, given the subject. "Oh, well, the coroner's office said so."
I kind of glossed over that when I read it...but two gunshots to the head? What are the chances that from that range he missed so badly that he was able to pull the trigger again?
You would be surprised - many people try to shoot themselves in the head and fail. Talk to a homicide cop or forensics investigator sometime - they often get called to scene like this because it looks like there was a shootout, except that when they analyse the blood spatter etc., it turns out the person shot themselves, then lurched around trying to pick up the gun they dropped to finish it off. I'm not making light of this - some of the stories I've heard about this phenomenon are quite horrific.
Really ya'll? This is hinted at in the first sentence and explained fully in the second paragraph. Not to mention the photo is of the original Rick Ross.
Thank God. "I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same damn time" fake Rick Ross is of no interest to me. He talks up drug dealing and other idiocy, even though he was never a drug dealer or gangster of any kind, while the real Rick Ross talks about the tragedy, the reality, of being involved in drugs and the streets and how it ruined his life and many others.
> Back in the day, Ross would offer the same deal with crack cocaine — to start you out, he'd give you $100 worth for free and you could sell it for $300.
no, he's actually extending credit - 'fronting' the product. he would loan someone an amount worth $300 in small end-user sales, for which the person would owe him $100 that they could pay back after selling it.
freemium would be letting people sample small amounts of the stuff and/or for a limited time, then making them pay when they want a larger amount or to keep doing it. my DARE class in elementary school told us that drug dealers would try and hook us like this, but i'm 29 and i'm still waiting for my free samples.
To be fair, the rapper 50 Cent deserves the title a lot more than the rapper Rick Ross deserves his. He actually was a crack dealer and he was shot 9 times.
Indeed it should. In this case, he was selling a LOT of drugs. But I seem to remember a story (maybe someone can get the link as I can't think of it right now) where they sent an undercover woman cop into a school.
A boy ended up falling in love with her and she persuaded him to get her marijuana. When he did, he was arrested. The kid didn't even smoke it himself, he was just hopelessly in love with her.
Actually that's not entirely correct; "entrapment by estoppel" is what you're referring to and is only a subset of what's considered entrapment. Additionally, the case law has been inconsistent for people trying to use it as a defense, as demonstrated here: http://www.metnews.com/articles/2004/chac041504.htm
Entrapment is where a state or federal official entices you to do something illegal that you wouldn't do otherwise. If you would do that thing anyway, it's not entrapment.
Isn't this how every prostitution sting ever works? Officer Friendly is wearing drag, and solicits someone passing by.
Or, Officer Friendly is pushing dope. "Hey man, try some of this dope." "Well no I really shouldn't..." "It's good stuff man you should try it." "Well golly gee willikers maybe I'll have just a taste!"
Bam, you're in federal prison with murderers and rapists.
They usually stay on corners that are known for prostitution. If you're there stopping to chat with a lady, it's likely that you're out cruising. Also, it's probably more likely that they let the guy go the first time but take his info and then arrest him the second time so they can be sure it'll stick.
The same applies to the girls. They can't prove it so they tell the girl to take a walk and they don't want to see them there again. You see this on cop shows all the damned time actually. If they catch them there again, they have cause to arrest. I would actually love if any cops are reading to weigh in on this, but being this is HN it's not too likely.
You can make light of my description of entrapment but that's what the law actually is...and that's why in most cases it's a really shitty defense.
I mean, don't quit your day job or anything but if this type of thing interests you, check out Rick Ross and some other major drug dealers in this documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxRVhgbVN9o
My friend met this guy and told me all about this a few months ago and I totally thought she just bought some random dudes BS ... but wow was I wrong. This should be a movie.
Somehow I learned of the real Rick Ross through the fake Rick Ross - I actually sought out the 'everyday I am hustlin' track on YouTube and, a few clicks later, there I was reading the legend on Wikipedia etc. Hence, sometimes to some people imitation really is the 'sincerest form of flattery'.
I am surprised the real Rick Ross made it onto Hacker News, what next, how the 'CIA invented rap music just to keep the black man down?' - that too is a great 'what if?' urban myth...
My thoughts exactly. I'd definitely send him a 100 for 10 of those. He seems like an awesome person everyone could learn from no matter his part in the crack epidemic. I mean the guy learned to read while behind bars and found the hole in the law he needed to become a free man again on his own. That takes drive. That's impressive.
I have a theory that cocaine, and later crack cocaine, were really the downfall of the United States from the late 70's to late 80's. It wasn't Reagonmics, it wasn't the Japanese. All the white collar (and a lot of the blue collar) guys were all doing powder cocaine, and all of the rest of the blue collar workers and the unemployed were all doing crack. Crime got worse, business got worse...
Considering that cocaine has been with us since the mid-1800s and saw other periods of high (ab)use, I think it's safe to say this is a false assumption. The decline of cocaine between the '30s and '60s makes the cocaine boom of the 80s seem like more of a problem than it was. In fact, cocaine pretty much built the entire city of Miami; it had a massive positive effect on the economy.
There is _always_ some fad drug ruining lives and society hasn't collapsed yet. For every wasting addict that you see there are dozens->hundreds more functional people using the same stuff.
An article that was on HN 8 months ago puts forth evidence to support that the rise and fall in violent crime follows the introduction and elimination of leaded gasoline. It sounds strange but every single country the researchers have studied exhibited the same phenomenon. Even matching lead contamination at the neighborhood level fits with crime maps.
At this point I think it's hard to say that it falls on one thing. There's definitely a combination of factors that have led to reduced crime rates.
Another one that I've seen floated around as responsible was the rapid growth of emergency medicine in the late 1960s. The idea being that injuries were much less likely to kill someone and people were that much more likely to retaliate.
Another good theory is how crime rates are pretty much proportional to birth rates. The idea being that it's resource competition.
I understand what you're saying. I don't think the article is saying that only lead is responsible, though. However, it does say that lead levels explain up to 90% of the variation in violent crime in America. I have no knowledge of statistics, but that sounds pretty impressive.
The initial sudden drop in rising crime rates coincides neatly with personal computing and games consoles, and the final smackdown is delivered with the popularisation of the internet.
Except that there were plenty of videogames in the 80s, when crime was still going up...which is a glaring hole in the theory. Sure, the graph shows that claims of videogames leading to increased violence are probably bogus, but there's no evidence that they reduce violence either.
My money's on the environmental lead theory. I think the rise of ecstacy is too marginal to account for the scale of the change. But that's just a hunch.
Given that the crime wave in question is usually associated with more impoverished elements of society, I'm guessing they couldn't afford Apple ][s, Macs, IBM PCs or even Nintendos in most cases.
And yet again you jump to conclusions involving race. Somebody says Oakland is dangerous, `oh you're putting African Americans down'. Another person states you shouldn't glorify a `criminal', you think it's because he's racist. Would you have posted that if Rick Ross had been White. Of course you wouldn't have. People like you, the hyper pc that will find racist connotations in every negative comment, like Al Sharpton, make everybody seem like a bad person for not being anti-white.
The original commenter stated that these two people would be fun to watch fight to the death.
Said about two white people or two blacks or two people in general you know it's a superfluous comment that does not add anything to the discussion.
Your parent poster is entirely right. Comments such as these drag the quality of the comments section here at hacker news down.
If you don't believe you should glorify a criminal or a rapper than you should say that and leave it at that. If you think that it is wrong to try to understand the mind set of a man who learned to read behind bars and read so many law books he found a hole in the law which allowed him to become a free man again you should tell us why there is nothing inspirational, interesting, or glorifying about this mans life.
Saying that two people would be fun to watch fight to the death, no matter how sarcastic, adds nothing and is superfluous.
I think you read my comment and responded w/o re-reading it, and not to mince words I chose the word 'might' carefully. Might and would are on the opposite side of logic. Therefore, I reject the premise of your comment on basic levels. I do concur with your conclusion that it is a sarcastic comment, however you likely don't need to point that out here.
Thanks for coming to my defence. Obviously, this person thinks race is an important factor in this discussion, which it is most certainly not. It is a shame when someone throws the race card out there. Neither drug dealers, nor poseur rappers that pretend to be deserve to be glorified. If I were a betting man, I would place a bet that either Rick Ross would bitch slap that troll and take his figurative lunch money if SHTF.
For the record, sorry, accidentally downvoted you (meant to upvote).
Unfortunately, such people start with the assumption that race is the motivation for dislike, and you can do pretty much nothing to change their mind. It's mind-boggling, but they're really, really convinced of it.
In fairness to the guy, he is doing a lot of good now. He served his time and from what I can tell from his appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience, he is a nice guy.
