"Freeway" Ricky Ross in History of Drugs in America
"Freeway" Ricky Ross (1960–) was a smalltime Los Angeles drug dealer who became one of the nation's biggest cocaine traffickers after inventing "Ready Rock," a cheap form of crack cocaine, in 1980. Ross' drug empire was instrumental in creating the crack cocaine crisis of the mid-1980s.
At his peak in the early 1980s, Ross was selling more than $1 million of cocaine—and earning between $100,000 and $200,000 in profits—every single day. He built a distribution network into dozens of cities around the country before being sentenced to life imprisonment in 1996. His sentence was later shortened to 20 years, and he was released from prison in 2009.