If there was an eye to the storm, if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack’s decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles’ streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick. Jesse Katz who is also in our film had this to say about Ross in 1996 in the Los Angeles Times: As quoted by the Los Angeles times quite literally none other than the infamous “Freeway” Rick Ross sat at the center of the political storm of crack cocaine. All while also weaving this material inside a narrative of the larger than life figure Rick Ross, a man whose life tells so much of the tragedy of the black American experience. From a set of exclusive interviews that included, but were not limited to, Coral Baca the woman that gave Gary Webb his source material to write the Dark Alliance, Julio Zavala the Nicaraguan at the center of the Frogman Case that led to Senator John Kerry challenging President Reagan a full decade before Webb’s Dark Alliance series, and former Sheriff Robert Juarez, who finally was willing to go on camera and admit to the wrongful practices used by he and his partners during the crack era after serving prison time for his illegal actions. Our goal was to dig deeper with research, and also get exclusive interviews that had never been on camera before, allowing us to have this story laid out in its truest form. This is the ground covered in our film Freeway: Crack In the System, which is now nominated for an Emmy in the category of Outstanding Investigative Journalism, Long Form.
A through line that takes us from my hometown of Los Angeles, California, out of the country to Managua, Nicaragua, and all the way to the top of the political ladder in Washington, D.C. Yet, I still did not know that at some point I would have a chance to play a part in making the documentary that would tell the definitive version of how it all went down. At age 16 I still remember the hearings in South Central Los Angeles, and the pamphlets passed around by local activist groups telling the community what had happened. So when the “Dark Alliance” story written by Gary Webb was published in 1996 implicating that this all might have come with some level of government involvement, put simply it was unbelievable. I grew up in a city of Los Angeles that had been ravaged by gangs, riots and none other than crack cocaine. As one of the producers I looked to my life and its arch as a guide in helping frame the story’s narrative. A tale bigger than life of drug kingpins, government scandal and devastation of the black community, was one that was personal to me as a filmmaker and African American. It is a rare instance where art and life truly run parallel, our recently Emmy nominated film “Freeway: Crack in the System” that was presented by Al Jazeera was one of those moments.
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