For decades, millions
of people have come here
in search of the American Dream,
but for many, that dream
is quickly disappearing.
Are you unemployed
or stuck in a dead-end job?
Thousands of people around the state
are losing their jobs every day.
Are you homeless, or living
in a bad neighborhood?
Unemployment shot up to its highest
level in nearly 26 years.
If the "American Dream"
broke its promise to you,
don't worry, we have an answer.
Let me help you help yourself.
I'm gonna give you three and a half grams.
You know what to do with this?
'Cause if you know what to do with it,
you gonna be all right.
Welcome to the game.
This is your guide book.
Our experts are going to
give you everything you need.
It's very easy to make
a lot of money with cocaine.
You could have a six
figure starting salary...
It's hard for me to believe that something
that small could be worth so much money.
You can make a million
dollars in a week
In this program,
masters of the trade
on how to get paid in this exciting
$400 billion global industry.
For the next 90 minutes, we're going
to focus on marijuana and cocaine,
but the same lessons work for any illegal
substance Americans are willing to buy,
or climb to the very top of the
food chain and make billions.
This training guide
will show you how to do it.
You want to know how to
make money selling drugs?
Name's Bobby Carlton,
I've lived pretty much
in every ghetto town,
and my mom had it rough raising us.
She had me very young.
A year after I was, uh,
born, my brother was born.
Years later, I'd have two sisters.
Stepfather, two sisters,
he'd eventually leave,
and then she'd be
stuck with four kids.
She'd basically just
try to raise a family
and try to earn enough
to put food on the table.
I look at people, they got to get
up, they got to be in an office,
they got to go to a factory, they got
to bang their heads against a wall,
they're trying
to earn, earn, earn,
but really, what they're doing is
just barely making their payments.
They're working just to get by.
I wanted to make money to go live.
I was always looking up
to the bigger kids,
who, people I perceived cool
and trying to emulate them.
The guys hanging on the
street corner, not working,
they have girls, they have
cars, they have money,
they seemingly don't ever have to
be anywhere at any certain time.
And I want in. I'm in.
What Bobby Carlton
was about to discover
is that marijuana makes money.
More money than tobacco,
cotton, even corn.
It's the most profitable
farmed product in the country.
I smoked a joint, and then
you just get into it.
And then other
people want to do it.
seven joints were in a bag,
it's a dollar for a joint,
you pay $5 for that bag.
Okay.
I'll buy a bag, break it down,
sell five joints,
smoke two myself.
It's kind of innocent, right?
Ninth grade...
but then they were like,
"How many grams are in an ounce?"
They were like, "How many pounds
are in a kilo?" I was like, "2.2."
"And do you want me to tell you
how much that costs?"
Hence, everybody at school knew
what I was up to that day.
If Bobby Carlton
can do it, so can you.
How do you expand from a small circle
of friends and attract more clients?
Making money
selling drugs is easy.
Meet Pepe, a retired Southern
California drug dealer,
who's going to tell you how
simple it is to get customers.
Like I say, is not hard.
Everybody can do it.
Well, you just walk out to
the street and the park
and everybody is gonna say,
"Hey! Spark it up," and you'll start rolling.
If you smoke outside, you make a
friend, because weed makes friends.
Weed makes friends.
Now that you've
got some customers,
you're gonna need some product.
Where do you get it?
Most people know where to get it,
and if you don't know where to
get marijuana in bulk to sell,
all you have to do is ask one or two
people, and someone's gonna know.
People will front you as
many drugs as you can sell.
As long as you can continue to pay people
back, they will front them to you.
And if you want to skip the middle men?
Grow your own weed.
Pepe spent quite a few winters making a lot
of money without ever having to leave home.
To grow some weed, uh, in your
house, you only need electricity,
big lamps, and water.
You get in the internet,
you have the seeds, you know.
This is just kind of like
a starter kit for people.
You can get it at any hydroponics
store and get your whole setup.
They'll sell you the tubes, the
nutrients, the little planters.
In about 45 days, these will
grow to about six feet tall,
be lush, green, and lovely.
let it dry for a couple of days,
and then pick all the buds off.
So how much money
can you expect to make?
Yeah, you can make a lot of money.
I mean, like, is gonna grow
a pound for each plant,
and a pound in the streets
goes $2,500, $3,000,
if it is a good weed.
Per 10, how much you gonna have?
$30,000.
In three months, people,
they doing a whole house.
If you put 50, 150 thousand.
For many dealers, the risk
of jail time is worth it.
You make $100,000 selling drugs.
Hide the money, and go to jail, and
when you come out, you have money.
If somebody gave me $100,000
to go to jail for five years,
I would take it, you know.
What the fuck. I mean, you...
Sometimes, you work 10 years
and you don't even see $20,000
in your bank account.
But the nearly one million Americans
arrested each year for marijuana
are caught on possession charges,
and never even sold a joint.
Given the risks, you'll want to
save your money as fast as you can
and start trading
more expensive drugs.
I got into cocaine,
and I loved it.
When it comes to cocaine, America
is the land of opportunity.
It's the number one consumer
of coke in the world.
The largest study of bank notes
has found that nearly
nine out of 10 bills
circulating in the U.S.
are tainted with cocaine.
It's a law of nature.
Where there's demand,
there's supply.
And that's where you come in.
The life of a coke dealer
isn't easy.
When you start out,
you're alone, unprotected,
at the bottom of a ruthless,
international crime syndicate.
Most of the world's cocaine is manufactured
by drug lords in South America.
They smuggle over 500 tons into the U.S.
every year.
Along the way, it passes through
a long line of distributers,
until a couple
of grams get to you,
a pawn in a massive,
70 billion dollar game.
Pawns, man, in the game,
they get capped quick.
They be out the game early.
Unless they some smart ass pawns.
Curtis Jackson, otherwise known
as 50 Cent, had to learn quick.
My mom hustled to provide
for me, financially.
And her friends were all the people that
were out selling drugs as a lifestyle.
Curtis was raised
without a father,
and his mother was murdered
when he was eight years old.
My mom was all I had,
so when I lost her, I lost everything
that was pretty much good in my life.
Her old friends bought me things,
then they got tired
of just buying me things.
They gave me an eight
ball of cocaine.
And they told me,
if anybody bothers you,
you know, you tell them
you got it from us,
and you'll be all right
in the neighborhood.
I was about 12 years old
when that happened to me.
That's the incredible
thing about cocaine.
You can use it to make ends meet
when there are no other options.
You can be anybody, even a kid.
I would say about 14 or 15. That's when I
pretty much started into the drug trade.
Let's say you're down and out, like
John was, living in South Central L.A.,
crashing at your family's place,
with no money, not even for food.
We were living in the back
of my uncle's house.
He had this lemon tree, and one
day he came out and he was like,
We didn't have no food. You know, me and
my mom was eating lemons for dinner.
So, after that, I had to get paid.
The money that you could make
on the corner was real good.
I started off with small amounts,
then I got to the big amounts.
Crack, the most popular form of
cocaine sold in the open market.
It's cheaper than powder, so low
income users can afford it.
When you work for an organization,
they'll supply you with
$10 crack cocaine rocks.
Because most of your
customers are addicts,
they'll be impatient to make a
buy right out on the street.
And the good thing about crack
fiends is they'll keep coming back.
Some guys will make anywhere
from $1,000 to $10,000 a day.
Are you the man
with them jumbo 6s?
I'll take about three
or four hundred.
Damn.
It's harder than functioning in
mainstream or corporate America
because the dynamics
of it is different.
In order to take a position in that world,
you can just, "pow." Just shoot.
The chances of getting robbed
are pretty great, you know?
You do as much as you
can to minimize that,
but somebody at some point
is gonna want what you have,
and they're not gonna have
the money to pay for it.
They are gonna try
and take it from you.
with 30 years' experience investigating
the criminal drug world.
If I steal a television set out
of, uh, you know, Best Buy,
it lists for $1,000, I'll sell
it for $200 on the street.
If I go rob the dope dealer,
I get all his cash,
and I get drugs.
And the advantage
of stolen drugs is
when I steal a guy's coke
that's worth $1,000,
I get to sell it for $1,000!
There's no discount for hot dope.
Ever happened to you?
Mmm.
Not me. No, I never had
no problems like that.
'Cause at the end of the day, you fuck
me, you gonna know what's happening.
Are you gonna give them your drugs or
are you gonna tell them to fuck off?
And I'm the person
that's gonna say fuck off.
If you don't have a pistol, I don't
know why you even selling dope.
You won't last. 'Cause
somebody gonna try you.
Anyone who is dealing
drugs in this community,
if they do not have a gun on
them, believe me, it's close by.
It's under a stoop, right around a
corner, tucked behind a phone booth,
but it's close by.
They look up in your face,
they look up in your eye,
they see the gun and they
know who's gonna use it,
who ain't gonna use it.
A, assess.
"Don't shoot them, kill them."
Because if you shoot them, you gonna
make them angry enough to come back
and really hurt you.
So, if you're gonna shoot,
shoot to kill.
It was like motherfuckers were shooting
each other every day on the news.
It was like, New York, very much
like a stabbing society, you know.
Something goes wrong, somebody
sticks a knife in your chest.
It was a drug deal gone bad,
I got the worst of it.
Stabbed here, stabbed
here, stabbed here.
Once in the back of the head, once in
the chest, entered the left ventricle,
and this is from
the open heart surgery.
I don't want to say it's a miracle, but
the doctor brought me back to life.
If you really want to lower
your risk of getting hurt,
stabbed or shot, packing a
gun can only get you so far.
Hiring backup is a great idea.
Who do I hire?
Do I hire nobody...
Nobody's heard of?
Or do I hire a guy who's
got the biggest reputation
for being the craziest
motherfucker?
The illegal drug market hires people
with reputations for violence.
But don't think just because
you have a gun and a few guys,
you can just go out and
start acquiring territory.
Officer Neill Franklin served 33 years on the
Maryland State and Baltimore police forces.
Having overseen 17 drug task
forces, he can tell you,
if you want to be
a corner hustler,
you're gonna need
permission first.
As you try to acquire
your market place,
there's probably gonna
be someone already there.
They're not going to share or give
up their territory that easily.
They're not going to share
it or give it up. Period.
They would definitely
approach you,
trying to sell it in an area
without someone's consent.
So I registered with the neighborhood
thugs, and that's how I got on.
Basically, you got to
protect your neighborhood,
and do the things that the
organization require you to do
I remember having
a homicide one day,
and they set
this inmate before me.
Two seconds into the conversation, I
realize I used to play with this kid
and knew his brothers.
"How'd you get in here?"
He said, "Well, I'm in here for homicide."
He says, "Well, I was in the game.
I was in the game.
"And in an alley
behind Callow Street,
"I had to do what I had to do,
and I ended up taking someone's life
"defending myself because
I had to defend my territory
"and my business."
So now you know what it takes to make
it on the street in the open market.
But prices for drugs nowadays are way
cheaper than when Big John was selling,
and the risks are just as high.
If you don't wind up
getting killed by rivals,
or hooked on your own product,
In today's drug market, you're risking
your life for less than minimum wage.
If you want to go for the real money,
you got to get off the corner.
Detroit. City of opportunity.
Once upon a time, the symbol
of America's might and power.
The heart of our
manufacturing industry.
The home of the American Dream.
One of the highest unemployment
rates in the nation.
Twenty-five percent of the population
has left in the last 10 years.
For those without a job or who
can't move, they need to hustle.
Mr. X wants to get out of the downward
spiral that's hit Detroit today.
And he's going to tell you
what that means.
or coke, or whatever the fuck
they're selling that's illegal.
Because that's the only way out.
I have a lot of bills.
I got rent to pay.
But don't nobody really care
about your problems, man.
You got to have the money, so,
welcome to the cocaine game.
I rarely show
my face on the scene.
Oh, man, I play
the phone game, man.
Switch up my phones.
Keeps me off the corner.
Uh, what is it that you want?
Yeah I can get you a T for 70.
Okay, cool.
I'll see you in 30 minutes. Bye.
Bye.
And bam.
That's how you win.
Shit, I'll be damned
if somebody tell me,
"You got us working eight hours
for fucking $60, $70, man."
That's crazy.
That's too much work.
I just made that shit
in a phone call.
The American Dream is
just to have enough money
to be able to do whatever you want
to do, whenever you want to do it,
based on your own hard work.
Shit, just what I have on the
counter would probably get me
anywhere from 10 years
to about 15 years.
I'd rather be out here getting
it than not getting it at all,
I've been really trying to free
myself, use the coke to free myself.
As a private cocaine dealer, you'll
be mostly selling Ts and eight balls,
sixteenth or eighth of an ounce little
baggies for up to 150 bucks a pop.
Ramping up to 20
customers a day is easy.
You'll be paying $500 for
your day's worth of cocaine,
and you'll cut it in
half with baby laxative,
which brings your profit to a total of a
grand a day, and you just got started.
Fiends from outside
into your home.
They might bring the police with them,
with the wire taps and everything.
Man, they try to get as close to you as
possible, and you keep them at a distance.
But you got to keep
that friendship with them.
You can't be like, aggressive
with your customers.
You got to treat them fair, you got
to treat them like regular people.
Man, a stash spot
is stashed away, hidden.
Get that shit out the house,
keep it out the house.
Don't let nobody come
to the house to buy it.
I wouldn't put my money anywhere
that someone else can control it.
It'd be best to hide that
wherever you put your dope at.
You get about 500,000
or something like that.
Start me a couple businesses, man,
get right up out of this shit.
If you decide that you ever
want to pick up this game,
shit, pick it up for the right
reason, the money only.
Save from the time that you get it
to the time that you quit, man.
And you won't be in it so long.
If you choose
to be a cocaine dealer,
If you're black, you're about four times as
likely to be arrested than a white dealer,
because white Americans buy and
sell more cocaine than anyone else.
It's the circumstances to where they're
actually setting up to sell the drugs,
See, the black drug dealers
will be in the neighborhoods
where the law enforcement will search
people without very much reasoning.
I mean, my first case,
it was like a fluke.
He, uh, ran where we're at.
I happened to be just standing outside,
and the police say,
"Get up against the fence."
And I'm like, "Man, come on,
why I got to get up against the fence?"
"Shut up."
Next thing you know,
they pulled this
big brick out my pocket.
So, that was the beginning
of the end, right there.
You're not only more
likely to be arrested,
but prosecuted,
with heavy prison time.
The reason that 94.5%
of people incarcerated
under the Rockefeller Drug
Laws are black and brown
is that's the way
the DA's operate.
Business mogul
Russell Simmons spent years
lobbying against the harsh Rockefeller
Drug Laws of New York City,
which treated the non-violent crime
of drug dealing the same as murder.
I mean, imagine you're a model.
You know, a fashion model. You
know, like some blonde girl.
It doesn't matter where you're
from, you're not going to jail.
And if you're some guy
from the hood,
maybe you'll go
to jail for 20 years.
Hell, they tried
to give me 45 years.
So, I did a lot of time. I did, like
five years, spring something like that.
And a white drug dealer will be in middle
America, somewhere in the suburbs.
That isn't in a space where he can just be
searched for no reason at all or go to jail.
Curtis Jackson, Russell
Simmons, and many others
have successfully
persuaded New York
to reduce some of their
harsh sentencing practices.
But 90% of those
convicted on drug charges
are still African-American
and Latino.
Like they say for any business,
the golden rule, location,
location, location.
I didn't care if people
knew where I lived.
People would just come to my
house, and I would go outside
and just give them the gram, and we
would do the transaction that way.
In 2003, I was the main coke dealer
for all the private schools in L.A.
If you're gonna be a private coke
dealer, this is the way to go.
In a nice, suburban neighborhood,
selling to the largest
cocaine market directly.
and already knew where to buy
cocaine for him and his friends.
So, he was in a perfect position
to go into business for himself.
What's going on
through my head is,
just start selling drugs
to support my habit
and to support the
lifestyle that I wanted.
People want drugs,
so I can sell drugs.
'Cause I know where
to get it already.
My first rock was about this big,
and I remember
showing my friends this.
They were like, "No fucking way you have
this big of a rock with you right now,
"like, this is insane."
It was like,
"This is awesome, this is exciting."
The stories that grew out of me being
a coke dealer just went from this
to like, you know, this, and I was
suddenly, you know, the guy...
You know, that everyone's
talking about,
I threw a party at
the L'Ermitage hotel,
and I got, like,
the Penthouse suite.
I've always wanted
to be loved and accepted.
And that's what selling coke gave me.
It gave me that power,
it gave me the feeling
of acceptance.
It was definitely addictive
to be a drug dealer.
Not only the money
that you got from it,
but the way people
talked about you,
the way people looked at you,
the power that I felt from it.
I just liked having money. It gave
me security, it made me feel good.
People don't know what's a
gram, and what's not a gram,
they've never seen
coke before in their life.
The market rate for a gram
was about $50 for coke,
but if you're a rich girl
who didn't know anything,
I would probably sell you
.5 for about $60 to $75.
A guy like Mike makes half as
much as our Detroit dealer,
working half as hard, but with
virtually none of the risk.
The word got out that I have
coke, and I'm selling coke.
The dean in the school,
they pulled me in,
and they said, "Hey look, you know,
we're hearing that you're selling drugs,
"and we want to do a drug test on you."
So, at that point, you
know, I thought to myself,
"Well, I better really slow down on this
and not do it anymore."
Mike failed his drug test,
and was kicked out of school,
but never did any hard time.
When dealing small amounts,
the nicer the neighborhood,
the less chance of getting busted.
it'll still take years to get that
mansion in the hills you want.
To be a big time player,
you need to get committed.
It's time to start
building a business.
Instead of selling ounces,
I started selling keys.
A key is a kilo of cocaine.
A single kilo can run
you about $20,000.
I had what I believe was skills.
This is Skipp. He did really
well as a corner hustler.
I had the skills to sit on the
wall and make about $8,000 a day.
Once you've stacked up enough money,
you can buy larger quantities
and supply dealers yourself, which is
what Skipp's gonna teach you to do.
I was 10 or 11 years old, my
family life was dysfunctional.
My mother worked two jobs,
my father wasn't in the home,
so before drugs came
into the community,
lot of people who would hustle would
rob banks or rob jewelry stores.
The aggression, the
violence wasn't for me.
Skipp was struggling
to make ends meet
in order to protect himself from the
Crips bullying his neighborhood.
but it was the relationships
I had with the Crips
that actually
introduced me to drugs.
I saw them having money, and I was
asking them what are they doing,
and the more I hung out with them, I
got more into the culture of drugs.
We used to go to, uh,
different areas
that weren't populated
by the L.A. culture
so they wanted it, but they
didn't have the connection,
so we would come out
and be that connection.
You'd have to have, uh, a
family contact or a friend.
I myself went to Las Vegas.
There are more than a hundred
street gangs in Los Angeles.
Police now say they have
become heavily involved
in the drug trade, exporting their
crimes throughout the west.
Going out of town when people
knew you were from L.A.,
that number one,
made you a star celebrity.
And then, if you were the
guy who had the drugs,
it made you an even
bigger celebrity.
Made all the girls love
and want to come to you.
The difficult part became
how to get it out of town.
I myself would always
buy a bucket.
Put whatever I want inside of it
and go get a girl who likes me.
Don't tell her what's in the
car, and let her drive it.
Did the girls
ever get pulled over?
Nah, I've been fortunate that
that has never occurred.
Um, however, they did get pregnant,
and I now have children.
The relationships that
I wanted for a weekend
have lasted longer
than I expected.
A lot of smugglers get
someone else to drive.
But how do you keep
track of you driver?
The DEA make a living
chasing drugs across country.
So they can tell you how the smartest
suppliers keep track of their cargo.
the source of supply had rigged
this car with a GPS locator
and a phone, so he could
actually dial into the phone
and he could monitor if the transaction
was going correctly or not.
He would know if the vehicle
was out of position.
Now, you don't want to put
your drugs in the trunk.
You're going to want some new
options on your vehicle.
Designing "traps" is standard practice
for any local chop shop.
It's kind of like
a combination safe.
It has to be a series of things
activated in the vehicle
Like, they may have to have the air
conditioning on, the blinker on,
and a couple of other things within
the vehicle for it to activate.
You got money to spend,
you'll get a real good trap.
We've seen some sloppy
ones, this is good work.
When they're closed, you would never
know by looking at it with your eye
so whoever constructed this
one was a professional.
It goes the whole length
of the back seat area.
So you could fit probably
in excess of 10 kilograms
of, uh, narcotics, large amounts
of currency or weapons.
Now you're ready.
But before you hit the road,
Pepe has some tips from back in the
day when he was running cocaine.
Get up in the morning,
you be ready.
Check your car, no lights broke.
Insure your car, everything.
Even the speed limit.
25? 25. No more.
75? 75. You know?
15, school? 15, school.
Take it easy.
And you get there. You be there.
So how much does
a smuggler expect to make?
If they take 10 kilos, they give
me $4,000 just to smuggle it,
or if it was more?
5,000. It all depends.
So you've driven a few
kilos across country,
you might be making
mid six figures a year.
Once you're in the game, you realize
just how many people want drugs.
There's everybody from the Wall Street
types to the people on the streets,
to kids going to concerts,
the stoners.
Everybody wanted cocaine.
What domestic smugglers
make in a month,
Bobby Carlton would
eventually make in a day.
In the 70s, all the cocaine was
coming in through South Florida,
and uh, back then they used to
call it the South Florida shuffle.
Everybody and anybody was selling
drugs, running drugs, moving drugs.
They were coming in, and
they were going everywhere.
The posses buy cocaine
for about $5,000 a kilo.
The drugs are then brought here to
Miami, where they're divided up
and shipped all over
the United States.
The initial $5,000 investment
is worth $125,000.
A girl that we had known, me and
some friends, we had gone over
to her house for a party, and I went with
her into her garage, and I was shocked.
There was boxes and boxes of
cash just all over the garage,
and it was just packed with money.
I just looked at her and I said,
"Look I don't care what you're into,
"or how you do it, I want in."
And she introduced me to somebody,
and, uh, that somebody
put me on a boat.
The way it works is their
drop-off point is Bimini.
Bimini's literally like 70 miles
off the coast of Florida.
You can go to Bimini, load up,
"Go fast boats" are called
go fast boats for a reason.
These, like, Colombian
cats hedge their bets.
What they do is they send about
15 to 20 of them at a time.
the odds of getting arrested are
very slim, the money's very good.
You get into Fort Lauderdale
or you get into Miami,
and uh, you drop a boat off, and you
get a bunch of cash and that was it.
When you're 18 years old and you
come from a very poor family,
like stuff's just not happening
for you, that's a lot of money.
Fifty grand a day
would satisfy most people.
But not Brian O'Dea.
Brian was one of the most notorious
drug smugglers in the world.
He and his 120 employees would
take in over $100 million a year.
Brian's going to show you
how a college dropout
can become the CEO of a major
import-export business.
I sent two pounds of hash
to myself from England.
I got 19 months for that,
and went to prison.
When I got out of prison, I had
no money and nothing going on.
So, I thought,
maybe I can kick start
my getting back into the
world with a little coke.
I had $500 in my pocket,
and an address.
Couldn't speak a word of Spanish,
but figured I could figure it out,
so I took off to Colombia,
and I said,
"Do you know, uh, Benny?"
Showing him my card
with Benny's name on it.
I won't say his last name right now.
I might get myself shot.
So the guy, he said,
"What do you want?"
I went like that,
and I said
"Well, I got $500 with me."
And, you know, everybody started
crying laughing, right.
I told him I just
got out of prison,
I got my hands on... That's
all I could get my hands on,
and I'm just trying
to get a life started.
So he said,
"Senor, muchos huevos."
He thought I had a lot of balls.
He said,
"I'm gonna get you 50 grams of coke.
"You can cut it in half
'cause I'll give it to you pure.
"You should be able to get about
10 grand out of that back there
"if you sell it in grams."
I don't know where
I came up with this,
but I got a pin, and I
heated it with a lighter,
and you can put a hot pin
under this cellophane here,
and that will pop open.
So, then you can slide the
cigarettes right out of the pack
without breaking the seal.
The 50 grams of coke
fit into this pack
like it was made
to fit into that pack.
I thought,
"Ah, this is brilliant!"
I put the cigarettes with
the coke in it in my pocket
with the pack I was smoking.
Leaving Colombia, you have
to go through immigration.
There's no just going
and getting on the plane.
So, I'm going through immigration, there
are two guys there, and they go...
"On behalf of the Unites States Government,
we're checking all people
"who fit a profile,
who seem to be involved with drugs..."
I said, "Are you kidding me?
I'm a reporter! I'm a journalist!"
But they said, "We still have to
take your clothes off, please,
"and get your suitcases off the plane."
I'm going,
"No! I'm not taking my..."
"Sir, there's nothing we can do about it.
You have to."
I take my pants off,
still have my jacket on.
I pass them my pants, cursing
and swearing, and my socks,
and I reach my hand
into my jacket pocket.
I put the cigarettes I was holding
the coke in on the bottom
and the cigarettes I was smoking
on the top, and I flipped it open,
the one I was smoking, pulled
out a cigarette and lit it.
Offered them a cigarette,
which they each took.
I mean, these guys are making 30
bucks a month, we can't forget.
I'm lighting their cigarettes,
and I take my jacket off
and hand it to them, and my shirt,
holding the cigarettes and the
coke in my hand the entire time.
The moment they handed me back a piece of
clothing that had a pocket in it, shwamp!
I immediately stuffed
the coke back in the pocket.
And that's how I got
in the coke business.
After that, Brian O'Dea
was in business.
He got a small amount of coke, and he dissolved
it in water, and then poured in material.
What we used were ponchos, or ruanas
as they're called in Colombia.
So, here we now had this piece of material
that had a couple of grams of coke in it,
and then I just folded up those ponchos
buddy, put them in my suitcase,
and headed on a direct flight to L.A.
from Bogota.
You just soak it in the water, and
then evaporate the water off. Simple.
Of course, methanol is what you should
be doing it with, and not water,
'cause methanol evaporates
off at room temperature.
Water, you got to wait forever
for the shit to evaporate,
which is, you know...
It's a learning process.
If these individuals were
putting their expertise
towards a legitimate goal,
could probably be very
wealthy as entrepreneurs.
We have seized drugs
in prosthetic legs,
heroin in kidney beans,
in the back of paintings.
Individuals swallow condoms filled with heroin.
Heroin pellets, we call them.
Once that condom breaks open
or that balloon breaks open,
there's not much anyone's going to
be able to do to save your life.
A million dollars in a few
months is a lot of money.
But how would you like to
make that in a few days?
Everyone dreams of climbing to
the top of the game one day.
Some people can play baseball,
basketball, or sing, or dance.
With some of the icons being
millionaires from selling drugs,
of course, I wanted...
I didn't want to be like Mike.
I didn't want to be like Michael
Jordan or Magic Johnson,
I wanted to be like...
I wanted to be like Freeway Rick!
My name is Freeway Rick Ross.
My claim to fame
is being a drug kingpin.
At that time, I never did
drugs, I had never smoked weed.
I was going to a junior college playing
tennis when my car was broken down.
I was in financial
ruins at the time.
I needed some money.
Narcotics is
a thing of the future.
If we don't get
a piece of that action,
we risk everything we have.
I mean, not now, but 10 years from now.
When they put those movies
out, that made us curious.
I mean it was almost like
being a movie star.
You know, how people
wished to be movie stars.
That was the way I felt
about cocaine.
We went to the movie, it might
have been 15 or 20 of us.
And we were all curious.
Most of the older people were
saying, you know, that, uh...
"You can't make any money
in South Central off of cocaine."
What I found out is that the PCP
dealers made so much money for PCP,
they had the money, and they
became my first customers.
We just kept escalating
and escalating
until my mom found out
and put me out the house.
I was ghetto-rich at that time so I had
plenty of places that I could move.
The trick to becoming a kingpin
in any industry is innovation.
Freeway Rick introduced
crack to the West Coast.
When people snort cocaine, they snort
so much their nose start bleeding.
So, they needed another way
to get it into their systems.
People would come by
early in the morning,
you know, like, doctors and
nurses and truck drivers.
They want to get some,
and they want to smoke it.
They started saying stuff like,
"Man, I wish it was ready to go already."
So we got hip, and we started
cooking it up for them,
so we would have the powder
here and the Ready Rock here.
Eventually, everybody started
wanting it, uh, Ready Rocked.
For one minute, it was
like, in South Central,
then it moved to Inglewood,
then it moved to West L.A.
Then it moved to Compton,
then it moved to Watts,
it's like a virus.
Pretty much every day I could do a
million dollars' worth of drugs.
There was days that I would go to
two and three million dollars.
I gave a lot of money away.
I mean, that's part of,
you know, being successful,
so that you can help your
family and friends, you know.
Somebody would come up to
your house when it was due,
car notes, light bills,
you know, friends in jail.
So much stuff... You know, just
give to kids on the street.
I mean, it's a good feeling when you
can help somebody else, you know.
One of the best feelings
that you can have, so...
I probably used to take about $40,000 a
day around with me just to give out.
You know, 'cause people be coming up
to me all day, anyway, to see me.
So, you know, you got to give
it to them if you see them.
When you're a kingpin,
word travels fast.
Like Pablo Escobar was
to many Colombians.
For communities with
struggling economies,
you are a primary job creator,
community leader, godfather,
bank and charitable organization.
You know, if I was in trouble, I would
want somebody to give me a helping hand.
When you're this high profile,
there's enormous pressure
on law enforcement to make a bust.
And if your operation is tight,
collecting evidence
can be nearly impossible.
That's when Meltin puts a bag of
marijuana into Ferral's pocket.
California Judge Jim Gray
can explain their thinking.
"I know this fellow may have been
involved with drugs before,
"so I'll plant some on him now.
"So, he's good for it from before,
maybe not this time,
And then, they actually go to
court and they involve themselves
in what they call "testal lying."
And that's how they
busted Freeway Rick.
The cops on my case
had planted drugs on me.
I pled guilty to 10 years.
So, knowing the cops are going
to arrest you at some point
no matter how good you are,
what can you do?
The first thing you need to
understand is how drug cases work.
Drug cases are prosecuted
unlike any other criminal case.
Here's a cop and
a lawyer to explain how.
It's impossible for the police
to have a normal procedure
in a crime where
nobody wants to report it.
Nobody calls 911 when they use a
drug, buy a drug, or sell a drug.
In traditional law enforcement,
a crime gets committed,
police try to find
who committed the crime.
This is the way
drug enforcement works,
you look for a suspect, and then you try
to trick them into committing the crime...
For you!
It's backwards.
So the government
goes around sort of saying,
"Let's find suspect, who should be a...
"Well, let's try to set some fucker up."
Here we are, observing the DEA,
who've arranged to buy
drugs from a suspect.
He's the guy on the right
with the baseball cap.
He's completely surrounded by law
enforcement, and has no idea.
Just chill, just chill. Got any weapons on you?
Anything on you?
Nothing? No guns,
no knives, no drugs?
All right. But just to protect,
do you have anything on you,
The reality is that the cops don't
really care too much about this one guy.
Their objective is to just use
him to cuff more dealers.
We'll lock up this middle man,
hopefully, this middle man will
cooperate and get us the distributor,
and we'll just go up the ladder
and keep going up the food chain.
It's very intimidating
and overwhelming.
I'm gonna say to you, you
know, you got a lot to lose,
you're looking at a lot of time.
I mean, even if...
Even if you're not,
you're gonna try to sell
him that he's going.
You know, you're going
to jail for a long time.
If they don't know,
they may give it up.
You either go to jail,
you get a record.
From there, you have trouble getting
a job, can't support your family.
Or in the other hand, you
become an informant for us,
and we'll let you off the charge.
This exact scenario is what
gets most dealers into trouble.
One of your employees or
customers gets picked up by cops
and turned into a snitch.
Yes, this was a situation in Vegas
where there was a guy,
he started using drugs
and Las Vegas Police
somehow got a hold of him.
Eighteen-year-old Clifford Townson
denies he belongs to any gang,
but admits he traveled from Los
Angeles here to Las Vegas.
He has been arrested
for selling cocaine,
and police suspect
he is a gang leader.
They actually put it in
the newspaper, and on TV.
We were celebrities,
we were the L.A. guys
who had all the drugs, so...
Well, we were looking at 55 years.
Skipp was offered a deal.
If he would plead guilty,
and save the prosecutors
the trouble of going to trial.
The offer came that it would be
five years as opposed to 55 years.
Um, I signed up for it.
And what happened to the snitch?
He didn't get any time at all.
Matter of fact, he was let go, they
might have even paid him, I'm sure.
Federal drug money
is allocated to states
based on drug arrest numbers.
Alexandra Natapoff
is an award winning scholar
and nationally recognized
expert on snitching.
Snitches are very good
at producing arrests.
They may not be very good at
solving important crimes,
or getting drugs off the street,
or making communities safer,
but they are very good
at producing arrest numbers.
I was standing on the
side of 18, 12 officers.
Everybody pack a big gun.
You hear me?
And they, they are police.
They can shoot you.
Meet Derek Migras,
a Texas crack addict
who police demanded give them 20 drug
dealers in a local housing project.
Mr. Pascal told you if
you got incarcerated,
bad things can happen
in prison, right?
No, he told me that he
would make a phone call,
and have the biggest dick
son-of-a-bitch, excuse my words, y'all,
females,
but these is his exact words.
"I have the biggest dick son-of-a-bitch
in there fuck you every day."
So what you gonna do
if you was in my shoes?
Cooperate and say
what they want you to...
So Derek gave the
police a list of names.
And 28 people were arrested.
Most snitches in the arena of street and
drug crime will never have a lawyer.
They'll never talk to anyone
about their rights,
about the nature of the case that
the government has against them.
They'll negotiate with the police
officer right there on the street
or maybe in the back
of the police car.
All right, let me
tell you like this here.
I never bought drugs from Regina Kelly.
Straight up.
It turns out that all the
names were fabricated.
But cases like this
happen all the time.
There's another reason
Derek Migras
gave a list of innocent
people to the cops.
Because snitching
on a real drug dealer
can have very
serious consequences.
Rachel Hoffman was a young
woman in Tallahassee, Florida.
She was a college graduate,
she had a bright future
ahead of her.
But she was caught by the police
with a small amount of marijuana
and some non-prescription pills,
and the police threatened her.
They told her that she
could work it off.
She could do
an undercover drug buy.
She was supposed to buy
15,000 ecstasy tablets,
50 grams of cocaine,
and two handguns.
She said,
"Mom I don't want you telling anybody,
"'cause I'm getting
all my charges dropped."
Rachel called her father
just hours
before the sting operation
was to begin.
She said,
"Dad, I'm really thinking about you today."
And that was my last
conversation with her.
The people that she was set up to
meet knew that something was fishy,
and so they shot her.
And at the end of the day,
when the police were confronted
with whether they had made
the right decision
to send in a 22-year-old college
girl to make this kind of drug deal,
do you know what they said?
They said,
"Well, she didn't follow protocol."
Now, see that's where everybody feels
we're looking to blame someone...
But I asked you what happened, you said,
"She deviated from the plan."
Well, and that's where, uh...
Whenever the plan started going,
um, south, if you want to say,
uh, where we lost
contact with Rachel
because she did not show up at the
location she was supposed to have gone to.
You don't think she was pushed
into it, coerced by your officers?
Threatened with prison?
For charges that were never filed?
Again, we don't threaten people to
become confidential informants.
That's not part of how we operate.
No, sir.
The moral of the story
for most dealers is
But if you do,
name innocent people,
or demand a witness
protection program.
is having a few counter
surveillance guys on your payroll.
you run an investigation
on the cops following you,
so when cops break the law, you've got
it on tape, and can negotiate a deal.
I went in and told them
they planted drugs on me,
that I didn't have drugs
that particular night.
That I was a drug dealer, but
that night, I didn't have drugs.
What these cops were doing were going
around and doing this to a lot of people.
They wind up getting indicted,
and when they got indicted,
I agreed to cooperate against the
cops for what they had did to me.
And that's how the King of Crack
spent only five years in prison.
It's a great idea to get an ex-DEA
officer on your team as well.
When you're moving tons of illegal
cargo, like Brian O'Dea was,
you can never be too careful.
We all agreed that we would
move this thing forward,
that everybody would
go on a salary,
and the deal was no coke.
If you did coke you were out.
The problem was,
Brian loved cocaine.
He loved all drugs,
ever since he was a kid.
I can tell you about the first day at
school, first period, first class.
Around the corner came this guy,
He took me to his office,
and half an hour later,
I suffered the first sexual
abuse by an adult in my life.
As a Catholic, we were taught sex
was punishable by eternity in hell.
So I came out of that office negotiating
with God not to strike me dead today.
It was horrible, buddy.
My mind became a place
to get out of.
And so I, you know,
when I discovered that
there were substances that
could take me out of there,
I was going for them.
The moment I take cocaine, it's a
nightmare from that point until I stop.
Coke has such an ownership
thing, it wants all of you.
Brian knew this was the
biggest deal of his career.
And as long as he stayed
clean, he'd be all right.
The first part of
the load was 25 tons.
And we met it up
in the Bering Sea,
and then took it off up
into a fjord in Alaska,
repackaged it all
in wetlock fish boxes,
put it all on the trucks,
I mean, it was as smooth as silk.
Once it was all offloaded,
we started partying.
There was only one little problem,
and it wasn't Brian O'Dea.
Brian's partner couldn't help but party
with a little cocaine one night.
Then another night,
and then another one.
He'd show up at the house in the middle of
the night at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning
in a limousine, prostitutes,
cocaine, booze.
Well, when he found out that the load
came in, he came looking for his money.
And we were very concerned about him getting
out there with a whole pack of money
and creating a giant heat-score
with these bags
of coke and hookers,
so there was a concern
about giving him anything,
giving him something, giving him
a million bucks, what do we do?
So the boys decided to give
him 50 grand, and I thought,
"He is not going to be happy
with 50 grand."
He took that 50 grand,
he left that meeting,
and he went right to the DEA's office
with the money and put it on the table.
And said, "I can tell you where there's
millions more just like that."
A few days later,
Brian and his team
were expecting 50 tons
of marijuana to come in.
So Brian took the precaution
of hiring an ex-DEA agent
to run surveillance on any law
enforcement activity in the area.
The load came in, a huge load.
We got a guy out from San Diego
who has a spectrum analyzer.
He's able to isolate the
transmission frequencies of the DEA,
and on the way up,
my scanner lights up,
And the moment it crossed the
border between Canada and the U.S.,
DEA, the FBI, alcohol tobacco
firearms, coast guard.
Expecting to find reefer.
There wasn't a joint in sight,
but there was fresh donuts made
and coffee on the brew,
and they took that as insult.
You know, you can't help doing
stuff like that sometimes.
Seventy-five tons generated,
approximately 200 million U.S. dollars.
So where do you find an ex-DEA agent
or narc who's willing to work for you?
We've got someone
we can recommend.
In high school, I wore overalls with no
shirt, my jeans tucked into my boots,
and I could yell "yee-haw"
louder than the rest of them.
Well, any of the kids that we heard of
smoking marijuana, we would beat them up.
The entire time, we'd be drinking
and fighting each other.
I decided to be cop because I
wanted to be able to fight legally.
I loved everything
about law enforcement.
I learned how to manipulate
citizens into running, or fighting.
I was very popular among all
the other police officers
because of the excitement
I could get them in.
We were trained
when a motorist was speeding,
to get real close and then
activate the red and blue lights.
Well, I learned to lag way back
then turn my lights on to give
that motorist the opinion that
"I might have a chance
to outrun this guy."
you're addicted to the adrenaline
and you don't realize it.
I was the best drug agent
in the area.
There's not a day that we don't put
somebody in jail for narcotics,
for finding mainly marijuana.
I only had 5 miles of highway
in my jurisdiction
and I made over
100 drug arrests in one year.
He's got a gun! Shoot!
The DEA, they were jealous, because they were
supposed to be making all the big arrests.
The first month, I performed
seven drug raids.
The DEA were only doing one a year.
The entire DEA.
And they had jurisdiction
of every county,
I only had jurisdiction
in one city.
I'll never forget the last
marijuana arrest I made.
And something hit me, I thought,
"I make three or four of these a day."
Almost everybody I stop
has marijuana.
There's marijuana roach in your
ash tray, and I smell marijuana.
Ladies, any of y'all got
any marijuana on you?
I thought there's got to be
something to it.
Well, for years,
I had pounds in my house
as training aids
to train my drug dog.
So, I went home, and I smoked
that pot, and I loved it.
I'm like,
"This is what it's about."
It's one of the funniest
things I'd ever done.
I married my pot dealer,
this girl named Candy.
Candy and I were talking,
and I said,
"Should I make a film on
how insane the drug war is
"or should I just teach people
how not to get busted for pot?"
All these secrets I had.
And she said, "You gotta teach 'em
how not to get busted."
High Times, Cannabis Culture,
everything out there.
We went on the Internet, and
nothing was out there like it.
Coming off the success of the
Never Get Busted video series,
we begin getting
thousands of emails
of people being arrested and
mistreated by law enforcement.
And if I got an email and it
fit exactly what I used to do,
I knew
they were telling the truth.
And we were getting
thousands of these.
So Candy and I were talking
and she said,
"You know, Barry, you were so good
at busting all those citizens,
"you should start busting
some of these crooked cops,"
and I'm like, "Yeah!"
Barry Cooper's a guy you can
call if cops plant drugs on you.
Even if you've never
dealt drugs in your life.
My granddad told me
a long time ago,
tough times don't build character.
Tough times show character.
he called us and he said,
"Tell you what I think happened.
"They made a mistake in identity."
Confidential informants ended up
planting drugs on the wrong person.
It struck me later on
that evening,
it just kinda, you know,
my eyes popped open, like,
"Wait a minute. How do you
plant drugs on the right person?"
and informant
was instructed by police
to plant a bag of meth
in his daughter's car.
But unfortunately,
the information was wrong,
Yolanda Madden was a working, single
mother of two at the time of her arrest.
So Raymond flew to East
Texas and met with me.
And I told him how we could catch those
officers that planted the drugs on Yolanda.
Because some of them
were my ex-partners.
Barry planted two Christmas trees
under some grow lamps.
Then, Odessa cops
received an anonymous tip
that a major drug operation
was under way.
As Barry knew they would,
the police broke a number of laws
leading up to an illegal invasion
and search of his house.
Barry proved that Odessa cops
routinely break the law,
as standard operating procedure
in fighting the drug war.
Get these cameras ready.
Hey, I'm Barry Cooper
with KopBusters!
Why are you in my house?
I'm busy making sure these Odessa
cops quit planting drugs on people.
We're not giving nobody no hassle.
You did too. Y'all
planted drugs on Yolanda
and she's in prison because of it.
That's giving people a hassle.
You guys are wrong on this one
and you know it. You got burnt.
He got a media event, and
that thing went national.
In 2008, ex-drug officer Barry
Cooper set up Odessa police
to bring attention
to Madden's case.
It was a success.
And to prove we were right, the judge let her go.
She got out of prison.
Painful memories that melt away
as Yolanda Madden
emerges a free woman.
I went to prison a single
mom of two kids, 16 and 11.
My son is 20 and married.
And of course my daughter is,
she's getting ready to be 16.
And I'm talking to this
young woman, you know,
that was just a child when I left.
So, I mean, I miss the
years, you know. But...
I've got lots of ways
to sting cops.
It just takes money.
If you've come this far, you've learned
to beat cases and outsmart the law,
while stacking up hundreds of
millions of dollars in cash.
This concludes chapter six,
How to Be a Kingpin.
You're almost ready for the top
level, Running a Drug Cartel.
But before we go overseas
there's one more way to make
money in the game here at home,
even more than kingpins.
This is the secret level.
For all you government
officials out there,
we're going to teach you
how to expand your power,
and take out political opponents.
All you need is a drug war.
Drugs used to be legal.
Heroin, cocaine, everything.
Until about 100 years ago, when America
appointed its first drug czar,
a man named Harry Anslinger.
In his report to the U.S. Senate,
Anslinger detailed the reasons
drugs must be outlawed.
This is what he said.
"There are 100,000
marijuana smokers in the U.S.,
"and most are Negroes,
Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers.
"Their satanic music, jazz and swing,
result from marijuana use.
"It causes white women to seek sexual relations
with Negroes, entertainers and others."
Anslinger's popularity
soared with voters,
and lawmakers
began outlawing drugs.
Then the evangelical movement inspired
Congress to ban alcohol as well.
Gangsterism was a natural sequel
and battles for exclusive
territories erupted with a violence
unparalleled in the history
of law enforcement.
Guys like Al Capone were
suddenly making big bucks.
The black market exploded with such
violence that public opinion turned
and Roosevelt
ended alcohol prohibition,
crushing the burgeoning industry.
But Harry Anslinger didn't
stop pushing drug prohibition.
In the 1960s, he took his case all
the way to the United Nations,
and lobbied the whole world to adopt the U.S.
policy of outlawing drugs.
Richard Nixon would pick up
where Anslinger left off.
America's public enemy number one
in the United States is drug abuse.
While publicly claiming to
address addiction and violence,
Nixon used drug policy as a weapon
to move against those he thought
of as his political enemies.
To fight and defeat this enemy,
it is necessary to wage
a new, all-out offensive.
President Nixon created the Drug
Enforcement Administration,
with an annual budget of $65 million,
and started the war on drugs.
If you are a governor, mayor, police
chief, or any public official,
an enormous amount of money was suddenly
available from the federal government.
All you had to do
was enlist in the drug war.
All of us in law enforcement,
we're soldiers.
We developed the cases, we got the
informants, we did the search warrants,
we did the wire taps, but we
didn't take the money out of it.
So what happened?
All the wonderful little entrepreneurs said,
"Now it's my time."
Twelve years later,
the federal drug war budget
had grown to over
$1.5 billion a year.
And the Reagan administration
stepped up the rhetoric.
For the sake of our children,
I implore each of you,
to be unyielding and inflexible
in your opposition to drugs.
Say yes to your life.
And when it comes to drugs,
just say no.
"Just say no" is sort of a fraud,
it's one America
talking to the other
not even knowing how the
other half has to live.
David Simon is the creator of the
critically acclaimed series The Wire.
When you're at war,
you need a fucking enemy.
And pretty soon damn near everybody on
every corner is your fuckin' enemy.
David based the characters
in his show
on the real world events
he observed
during his many years as
a Baltimore police reporter.
Yeah, we were saying "just say no"
to involving yourself
in the drug trade.
It was like telling people in a factory town,
"Don't go to work for steel."
Or telling people in Detroit,
"Don't go to work for GM."
"Just say no" in West Baltimore
is telling somebody,
"Don't go work for the only factory
that is hiring in your neighborhood."
And the country is telling you implicitly,
"We don't need you."
You're a human being
without purpose.
And that's 10, to 15, to 20% of
our population at this point.
You got to realize we ain't got
no jobs around here or nothin'.
You know, so, every time we try
to make a little somethin'
to get on our feet, to try
and help to feed our family,
they come kicking the doors in and
knocking, knocking us back down again.
Even as you fall into the corner
culture and ruin your life,
um, you're granted meaning.
You're granted a purpose.
You're gonna go out and you're
going to sell this G-pack today
And you're going to bring that
money home to your people.
So "just say no" was a problem.
Um, in that, we had not given
the slightest bit of thought
as to what people in these worlds
were supposed to say yes to,
and we still haven't.
By 1986, the U.S. was allocating
$2.9 billion per year
for narcotics enforcement.
That's when the Democrats seized
an incredible opportunity
over the media frenzy
surrounding Len Bias.
Len Bias with 29...
Oh, my!
Len Bias was
a college star athlete.
He was signed to go
to the Boston Celtics.
he signs, like, a contract with
Adidas for millions of dollars.
He's got it made. He flew back
that night from the signing,
celebrating in his dorm room at the University
of Maryland, he's snorting cocaine...
And his heart failed and they said it
was because of, uh, heavy cocaine use.
And he has a seizure and he dies.
Eric Sterling
was working as a lawyer
at the House of
Representatives at the time.
The story is a horror
of how Congress operates.
The Democratic leadership figured if
they put together an anti-drug bill,
and they play it right, they can
win big in the November election.
Responding appropriately to the
public's alarm about drugs,
which, an alarm
they helped create.
We're dealing with nothing
less than chemical warfare
against the youth of this nation.
Press conferences, speeches,
"The Plague."
"Should we put in the death penalty?"
"Yeah, let's have the death penalty!"
People who push drugs must be put
in jail for a minimum of 50 years.
It had this quality of, like,
Sotheby's auction, you know.
"I'll see ya! I'll raise ya!
I'm tougher, I'm meaner!"
In my nine years
working for the Congress,
this is the only time we wrote
legislation in such haste
and without careful consideration.
Actress Susan Sarandon
worked with many others
to fight against
the harsh drug sentences
that were spreading out
across the country.
I just think people
don't understand really.
They just hear "tough on drugs"
and they just go, "Yeah!
"Let's do that."
You know, "We'll be safer."
They don't understand
what it, what it means.
Hamida Hassan,
a mother of three children,
moved to her cousin's house in Nebraska
to escape an abusive boyfriend.
They were selling drugs,
and I knew that, you know,
but I didn't concern myself with the
particulars of what they were doing.
It seemed more safe to me.
When her cousins were busted
Hamida was given the mandatory
minimum of 27 years.
I'm 25 years old,
I'm six months pregnant,
I have never been in trouble before
and I'm going to be sentenced
to a natural life sentence.
Right now, the way the laws
stand, you can murder somebody
and get out quicker than be in a
house where there's a drug bust
and you don't even know
what's going on.
You can end up serving 30 years.
It's crazy.
I mean, it's not right.
Since 1993, Hamida Hassan
has been in prison.
And her children have grown up
without their mother.
I just always break out in tears,
because I just miss my mom a lot
and I just hope that
she come home soon.
Many of the people in federal
prison, as I'm speaking right now,
who are there on drug charges,
are there on mandatory minimums.
Whatever charge they're serving,
they're serving a longer sentence
that in part reflects my failures
to be a better lawyer
in blocking that law.
It pains me very much,
you know, when I meet the
family members of these people,
uh, it breaks my heart.
It was a total success
for the Democrats.
Many of the congressmen
behind the mandatory minimums
were re-elected
the following term.
If you really wanna do good in
politics, be tough on drugs.
By the late 1980s
the CIA discovered that drug money
could help U.S. foreign interests.
Now we all know that the U.S.
government and the CIA supported
the contras in Nicaragua,
in the middle '80s.
Now it is alleged the CIA also helped
the contras raise money for arms
by introducing crack cocaine
into California.
There's no question in my mind
there is complicity
in the flow of drugs
into this country, period.
A senate investigation led by
John Kerry of Massachusetts
found that individuals who
provided support for the contras
were involved in drug trafficking.
Freeway Rick's former South
American cocaine supplier
was a major contributor
to the contras.
Eventually the DEA hired him
to set up Freeway Rick,
putting him in jail for 20 years.
The DEA paid Rick's supplier
for services,
and American crack cocaine users
helped pay for a U.S. government-supported
war in South America.
And when that first cocaine
was smuggled in on a ship,
it may as well have been
a deadly bacteria,
so much as it hurt the body,
the soul of our country.
But take my word for it,
this scourge will stop.
President Bush Senior
doubled the war budget.
And by the end of his administration,
it had doubled yet again.
During the '90s, government asset
forfeiture was also on the rise.
What forgeiture laws do
is they permit the government to
seize assets and money of people
where they believe that those assets
are connected to drug enforcement.
It's very easy for the government
to get assets this way
because the standard of proof
is so much lower.
No one needs to be charged
or convicted of a crime.
The message to law enforcement
officers was simple.
In the event that you are
an undercover officer
and you see someone
carrying two suitcases,
one is full of money,
the other is full of drugs,
follow the money.
Drugs coming up from Mexico
go north and east.
To seize the large amounts
of money,
I was instructed to begin working
south and west bound traffic.
I got extremely talented at seizing
money under the rules of law.
That's highway robbery.
I have heard a police officer say
"Chief, we need a new vehicle."
He'd say "All right, go out,
find a drug dealer and seize one."
And so they literally
try to find this property.
If I found 100,000
dollars drug money,
that paid my salary for a year,
auto expenses, dog expenses,
whatever it took
to keep me on board,
everything after that was profit.
The same problem comes up with
regard to police corruption.
You go out in the field and
you will see a stack of cash.
So you just lift maybe 10, 20,
30, 40 dollars off the top
and nobody notices,
and of course
there's no accounting anyway,
so next time you will lift
maybe a hundred.
If I found a stash of money,
I'd take a couple hundred bucks,
stick it in my pocket
and then turn it in.
I'm not proud of that.
Between 2000 and 2003,
the Department of Justice
earned over one billion dollars
in forfeiture proceeds.
By 2008, that number had tripled.
By the time Clinton left office,
teenage use of drugs was higher.
High school students' use of
methamphetamines had doubled.
And heroin and cocaine were
cheaper and purer than they were
when the first drug laws
were passed in 1914.
The war on drugs is not winnable,
but it's eminently fundable,
and the government
is addicted to that funding.
You know, the worst thing
about this drug war,
it just ruined this job.
You know I began
as a police reporter,
somebody very sympathetic
to good police work,
and I still am sympathetic
to good police work.
But I have no regard
for the drug war anymore.
If you're a fan of
the HBO series The Wire,
you see this emphasized
over and over again,
that it's all about
statistics and numbers.
Radley Balko is a journalist
who spent years
studying the effects that federal drug
money has had on law enforcement.
You need to make as many
drug arrests as possible,
seize as many drugs as possible,
and that's how you get your grant
in the federal government.
If you're running
a police department,
you don't get massive grant money
for solving murder cases,
or rapes, or theft.
Your only major financial incentive
is to solve drug crimes,
and if you don't make the same
drug arrests as last year,
you won't get
the same budgets this year.
And yet, all you're doing is
making meaningless street arrests
that have no consequence.
You are just harvesting stats.
This incentivizes police departments
to set up specialized SWAT teams
so police can conduct
more drug raids.
And the U.S. government will provide
money for SWAT equipment as well.
No-knock raids are some of the
most cruel, horrible tragedies
a human can go through
because it's so terrifying.
I raided over 100 houses
in my law enforcement career.
There'd be 15 of us
in all this riot gear,
and the biggest, fanciest
guns we could get.
I was always the guy
who kicked the door in,
'cause I was
the most aggressive one.
And we threw flash grenades in
the window to confuse everybody.
The one that really
stands out in my mind was,
I remember a blonde-headed
girl with blue eyes,
like my daughter's,
and it almost seems like it
was one of my daughters now.
And uh, she had a brother,
and they were so scared.
Don't move, you understand?
Did you shoot my dog?
Did you shoot my fucking dog?
Why did you do that?
And we ripped that family
apart for a bag of pot?
Sometimes people feed
them wrong information,
sometimes it's just an accident,
where they read,
instead of "863" they read "868"
and they go into the wrong room.
And when they got to the house of
the former marine, Jose Guerena,
he had already been alerted by his
wife that someone was outside,
so he grabbed his rifle.
But before Guerena could remove
the safety from his rifle,
he was greeted by more than 60
bullets from law enforcement.
The SWAT team refused to let
anyone attend to Guerena,
leaving no hope
for him to survive.
We've raised a generation
of cops in Baltimore
who can make a drug arrest,
but can't do police work.
You don't know
how to use an informant
and not be used by an informant.
You don't know how to write
an intelligent search warrant,
you don't know how to retroactively
investigate a crime,
you don't understand
how to maintain a crime scene.
All the things that count
as quality police work,
that's a direct consequence of the
drug war that nobody thought about.
In the 1980s, there were about
3,000 SWAT raids a year.
Today, that number is estimated at
around 50,000 SWAT raids a year.
Most serving warrants on
non-violent drug offenders.
These raids gone wrong
are actually pretty common.
They happen, by my estimate, a few
times a week, across the country.
92-year-old Katherine Joneston was killed
when narcotics officers knocked down
the door at her home on Neal Street,
and then opened fire.
Earlier this week
a 68-year-old grandfather of 12 was killed
in his home in Framingham, Massachusetts.
While drug war money has financed
an unprecedented expansion
of U.S. law enforcement,
the bulk of drug money has continued
to flow outside U.S. borders
and into the pockets
of true masters of the game.
As a cartel drug lord, your biggest problem
is going to be counting your money.
But you'll have a few guys
hired to do that.
And a few more guys to count your mansions,
houses, planes, boats, luxury cars,
and all the material possessions
you could possibly dream of.
Like all the kings
and emperors before you,
you too will have
your very own army.
Driving around in custom made tanks designed
by top military equipment engineers.
If you are a mexican cartel lord
and too many of your men
find themselves in prison,
you just send a couple hundred of your best
guys down there and get them out of jail.
The guards won't stop you.
Anyone you perceive as being a
threat, you send a message.
You chop off people's heads.
You roll those heads
into nightclubs
or pile them up and hang their bodies from
bridges to keep your competition in line.
As a cartel drug lord, you kill
anybody who gets in your way,
literally gunning down civilians,
as long as you hit your target.
You'll be so used to killing,
nothing will faze you anymore.
Since 2006, over 50,000 people have
been murdered in Mexico's war on drugs.
Most of those cases
remain unsolved.
Not because you're careful
about covering up your crimes,
but because you terrify
the police.
What happens when you as a public
official, or a police chief,
receive an envelope with
photographs of your family?
It won't take you long
either to resign,
or to go along with their wishes.
The drug cartels have more money and
more guns than the police do.
In a lot of ways, that
doesn't make any difference
because the police
are on their payrolls,
but where they're not, they can
literally outgun the police.
To run a global company,
you need operatives
all over the world.
An international work force
rivaling any other Fortune 500.
So where do you find
your employees?
Like business school does
for our corporate leaders,
jails are like
the ultimate job fair
for gangs, dealers, hitmen,
and other criminals for hire.
We was in there beating
people up, robbing people.
I almost killed a guy. I beat him
so bad that I almost killed him.
You know, tensions
are high at all times.
If it's not between
the Bloods and Crips,
it might be between
the blacks and Latinos,
or might be between
the prison guards and inmates.
80% of the guys in there don't
have a high school diploma,
and grew up in a single parent home.
So if you have no one
to show you what manhood is,
you'll be just like
the sharks just out there,
only the strongest survive.
From 1920 to 1970 the rate of incarceration
in the United States was level.
From the depression, World
War II, the postwar boom,
through the '50s,
through the '60s,
the rate of incarceration
was level.
Public enemy number one
is drug abuse.
In 1970, the rate of
incarceration starts going up.
And it has not stopped
going up for a half century.
Only 5% of the world is American.
But today, America has 25%
of the world's prisoners.
The United States of America,
the land of the free,
leads the world in the
incarceration of our people.
We hunt the poor
And incarcerate them at levels
unheard of in the rest of the world.
No other nation comes close.
Not China, not Russia, nobody.
There are only two explanations,
one is that we are uniquely evil,
and the other is that we have
uniquely counterproductive laws.
And while the prison population
continues to grow,
the demand for illegal drugs
is still rising.
50% of America has consumed
an illegal drug.
Do they think they can lock
up half of the country?
There's just no stopping us.
Everybody I know wants to
do drugs is doing them.
They don't care if it's legal
or illegal, they're doing them.
And they are proud of it.
Some of America's most famous
business leaders, like Steve Jobs,
has said taking LSD was one of the most
important experiences of his life.
Quite a few americans agree with him.
I don't think it's as much a question
about drugs as it's about freedom.
Whatever this freedom word means,
we really gotta grab hold of that.
Either we have the right
to do what we want to do
as long as we aren't
hurting someone else,
or we're not living
in a free country.
I'm just horrified by the way
that we think of people
because of the choice of substance
that they put in their bodies
to alter their perception.
And we judge them as good or bad,
while we sip our wine
and have our cocktail parties
and you know...
Stick that hypocrisy right up
society's ass for me.
Some of them can kill you the first time you
try them and other ones are really fun.
And someone's lying to you
if they say they're not.
Our own power as individuals over
our own bodies, our thoughts,
our minds, our ideas,
and our feelings,
those are not things that
can be taken away from us.
And anybody who would allow
the state to take them away
doesn't deserve the title
"American citizen."
The vast majority
of drug dealers never make it.
They're either killed,
or wind up in prison.
But Americans just keep
demanding more drugs.
Approximately half a million Americans
are incarcerated on drug charges.
In recent years we've spent
more money building new prisons
than building new universities.
And they are beneficiaries, the
people who manage these prisons,
the prison guards' unions,
they all have a vested interest in
perpetuating this broken system.
And famous American freedom advocates
have been speaking for years
about the conflict of
interest for politicians.
Are you running for office,
and you need more dough?
Adopt a tough on crime position,
you'll get a lot of money from the
prison industry. Think about it.
But even the largest prison system
in the history of the world
is just another market
for drug dealers.
There are drugs inside jail.
Oh, you can find weed, coke, crystal meth, ecstasy.
Even heroin, you can find.
People work there, bring
it over, or visitors.
There's drugs inside jail.
Congratulations.
As a cartel drug lord
you're the number one organized
crime threat in the United States,
having set up franchises in
over 1,000 American cities.
You have an operating budget
larger than most countries.
You and your partners in crime make
over 150 billion dollars a year.
And business shows
no signs of slowing down.
Because like any good game, the machine
creates an endless supply of players.
The government always says drugs are
illegal, because they're bad for you,
and we're trying
to protect societies,
but the government doesn't
give a fuck about your safety.
The government, they don't
want you to use your drugs,
they want you to use their drugs.
So every night on TV, you see
a weird ass drug commercial
trying to get you hooked
on some legal shit.
And they just keep naming symptoms till
they get one that you fucking got.
I think once
I took my first Vicodin
it was just like this feeling of,
"Aah," you know,
like everything was not only
mellow but didn't feel any pain,
it didn't...
It just kind of numbed things.
I don't know at what point exactly
it started to be a problem,
I just remember liking it
more and more.
People tried to tell me
that I had a problem,
I would say,
"Get that fucking person out of here,
"I can't believe
they said that shit to me.
"They know nothing
about my fucking life.
"Are they out of their fucking mind?
"I'm not out there fucking,
you know, putting coke up my nose,
"I'm not smoking crack."
You're struggling
with the argument of,
do you have a problem
or do you not have a problem,
can you control it or can you not,
and I literally thought
I could control it.
And for one out of ten people,
this is how easy it is to fall
into the hands of addiction.
I snorted OxyContin and I remember
just falling down on that couch
and just feeling euphoric,
and feeling that,
"This is how I should feel,
this is how it should always be."
I had fun for a lot
of those years.
But for five or six of them, every time
I did it, it was a freaking nightmare.
Once you're addicted,
the drugs become interchangeable.
You're taking things
that people are giving you
that you don't even know
what the fuck they are.
They look like a pill and they're
shaped like something that you take,
so you take it.
You know. Xanax, Valium,
tomato, tomahto.
You know what I mean,
it's the same thing.
All in the same family,
fuck it, take it.
You know, OxyContin is very
expensive, and I couldn't afford it,
so eventually a friend said,
"Well, you can do heroin.
"Heroin's a lot cheaper and you can...
It's easier to get, actually."
And the cost was huge.
Beyond the price,
beyond the dollar.
I started losing my mind,
I was doing too much cocaine,
becoming too paranoid.
People started smoking it,
I started smoking it.
I was sweating, I was shitting,
I was vomiting everywhere,
and, you know, I said,
"I need to go to a hospital."
Had I have gotten to the
hospital about two hours later,
I would have died.
Having my mom look over me crying,
over her little baby boy,
in a hospital,
at 2:00 in the morning,
I just felt like shit.
My organs were shutting down,
my liver, kidneys, everything.
They were going to have
to put me on dialysis.
They didn't think
I was gonna make it.
My bottom was going to be death.
Within a month, I had relapsed,
and shot right back up to the same
amount of pills I was taking.
I remember just walking
around my house
and thinking every single day
like, I'm gonna fucking die.
I'm looking at my kids and I
need to be here for this.
It was everything that I loved.
And everything that loved me
was a price that I was
willing to pay to do coke.
That's a horrible price.
And for many addicts,
if they can't afford
to support their habit,
there is an easy solution.
I think when you come from a
poor family, you wanna do drugs,
and drugs cost money,
and then you see a way out.
OxyContin is very expensive.
And people keep calling you,
you know, people want drugs.
And it was hard
not to give them it,
because I knew I could make
50 dollars just like that.
The day I ate LSD,
the next day I sold LSD.
The day I did cocaine,
the next day I sold cocaine.
The day I shot drugs,
I was selling dope.
I never meant to get
in the dope business.
That wasn't my plan.
But it just started that way.
Eventually I would make my way
to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting
and a kid was reading "What is an addict"
and it said very simply,
"An addict is a man or a woman
whose life is controlled by drugs,
"in one form or another,
the getting and using,
"and finding ways and means
to get more."
And I heard that, and a
light went on in my head.
I knew I was an addict
for the first time in my life.
When people asked me,
"What's wrong with you?"
"I'm an addict".
Coming off of everything, I literally was
up 24 hours a day for 3 weeks straight.
And I mean, not sleeping, not even
nodding off for a fucking minute.
Like I was literally just up,
looking at the TV.
I had to regain motor skills,
I had to regain talking skills.
It's been a learning process,
like, it's been... I'm growing.
I just couldn't believe that
anybody could be naturally happy
or naturally function or be enjoying life
in general without being on something.
So I would say to anybody
it does get better, you know.
It just, it does.
Marshall Mathers, Mike Walzman,
Brian O'Dea, and Bobby Carlton
would take years in and out of treatment
programs before they finally got sober.
And this is normal.
Addiction is still a modern mystery.
Rehabilitation programs are underfunded,
and often unavailable,
except for the very rich.
But in promoting a culture of
addiction and substance abuse,
drug cartels have an even more powerful
ally than the pharmaceutical industry.
The number one
gateway drug in the world.
Yeah, it's the worst
drug on the planet.
95% of the violent offenses ever
committed by anyone locked up in prison
was done so under its influence.
And as any addict will tell you,
the quickest way to relapse
is compromising your judgment
and willpower with alcohol.
With legal drug companies
promoting drug use,
it would seem almost impossible to
fight the monster of addiction.
But there's one industry that's
mastered the art of drug dealing,
and they know the secret approach that could
threaten the entire addiction market.
I'm Patrick Reynolds. My grandfather founded the R.J.
Reynolds Tobacco Company.
My only memories of my dad were
of a man dying from smoking.
Tobacco is killing more than a
combined total of all the murders,
all the drugs, all the suicides,
and all car accidents combined.
Throw AIDS in, tobacco is
killing more than the total.
If tobacco were banned tomorrow,
and the DEA was going to
come after you for smoking,
the first thing it would do is it
would make it really cool to kids.
We'd have a black market tobacco,
there would be tobacco probably
manufactured in Mexico,
or some other country and imported...
They'd find their way.
We know what works
for fighting tobacco.
Smoking bans in public places,
high tobacco taxes, secession
programs, education,
and banning tobacco advertising.
What would happen
if we used the same approach
Patrick Reynolds described
succeeding with cigarettes
and applied that to all drugs?
That approach was tried in Portugal,
which had a huge drug problem,
and the effort crashed the black market.
NBC sent reporters to study the drop in
addiction and abuse rates among teens.
So have you ever used hashish?
No, never.
Why not? It's bad for us.
Portuguese Prime Minister
Jose Socrates
was one of the architects
of the new policy,
has some advice
for the rest of us.
I think the strategy can work
in any country,
you just need to rid yourself
of prejudice and take an
intelligent approach.
Even America's current
drug czar admits
that law enforcement
isn't the answer to drugs.
If you read the research, you
clearly and quickly come to realize
that addiction is a desease.
I think for too long we probably
thought we could either
arrest our way out of the problem,
or solve it through some
criminal justice lens,
and I think we know from past
history that is not the case.
Critics call the war on drugs
the single greatest public policy
failure of the last 50 years.
The DEA don't want
the drug problem to stop.
District attorneys don't want
the problem to stop.
Prisons don't want the drug problem to stop.
They're pushing it on.
The only person who's
paying is the taxpayers.
Freeway Rick Ross and Brian O'Dea
continue to give inspirational speeches
on the dangers of addiction and
the failures of prohibition.
I was sentenced to 10 years.
Within an hour and a half,
I met guys in there who were
doing 75 years for pot.
One of these guys
has since died in prison.
And the other guys are
gonna die in prison.
But I got the government selling me
cigarettes in there for 50 cents a pack.
Don't make sense, does it?
Didn't to me. Didn't to me.
Bobby Carlton,
now clean for over a decade,
runs a sober living house
in Los Angeles,
and helps other addicts get clean.
You know, it's just the money is so stupid
that everybody's a part of the problem,
Big John now works as a union electrician
and earns over six figures a year.
He and Skipp Townsend volunteer
as community activists
and gang intervention specialists
in Southern California.
I understand that I can't do any
better unless I know better.
And so for the most part when
individuals ask me for a job,
I understand that nine out of ten,
they are not even ready to get a job.
It's just what they're sayin'. But they're
gonna revert back to what comes easiest.
The current takes the path
of least resistance.
So, what's the easiest, what's
the easiest path? That's drugs.
After a friend of his was
killed by one of the cartels,
Pepe left the game.
For the time being.
Right now I'm a painter.
A simple painter.
And this... I enjoy my life right now,
I'm fine. But I know the way to make it.
If one day I need to, I will go.
Barry Cooper,
after constant arrests
and raids on his family's home,
is now seeking political asylum
outside the United States where
he continues to dedicate his life
vending the US drug war.
I'm not going to use our energy to try and
change the minds of the old Americans
that made the laws and expect
us to live under those laws.
I'm going to use our energy to rally
the masses who already get it.
And Neill Franklin, after 30
years fighting the war on drugs,
is now the executive
director of LEAP,
an organization of law enforcement
who are demanding an end
to the drug war.
It wasn't until after his retirement
that Neill Franklin chose to speak out.
What I have here is referred to as,
in law enforcement, as a shadow box.
And it basically contains the law
enforcement officer's career.
And in my retirement celebration,
this was presented to me
by Ed Toatley.
Ed Toatley was probably
the best narcotics agent
that the Maryland state
police had ever seen.
Ed Toatley was assassinated
in October 2000 by a drug dealer.
You get killed in this thing, I'll be
like, my generation died in Vietnam.
It's perhaps heroic, but it's
absolutely without meaning.
Because whether you make the five
kilogram bust, 500 kilos, a truck load.
None of it makes any difference.
Drug dealers and cops
are replaced just like that.
People losing parents, people losing sons,
people losing daughters.
You know,
Ed's kid's lost a father.
And those who are involved
in the illegal activity,
because you know what,
their lives are just as important.
If we decriminalized all drugs,
we would have billions
of dollars to battle addiction,
drug abuse and poverty.
But as long as we support
a drug war,
we will continue to encourage
our children to pick up the game
and discover for themselves
how to make money selling drugs.