His part in spreading cocaine around the city helped destroy the neighborhoods he grew up in, fueled kidnappings and killings, ruined the lives of just about everyone in his family and turned so many “good people” into “crackheads.” I could do anything that I wanted to do.”īut looking back, Tillman, now 55, says he sees his “success” much differently. “Life in Chicago was like velvet,” Tillman said. He bought so many houses for crack-cooking purposes that he couldn’t keep track of all of them. His drug-dealing associates enlisted the help of Chicago teenagers eager to make big profits from the easy work of selling dope. The 24-year-old “Freeway Boy,” was fearless and all about business.
#Freeway crack in the system documentary crack
In Chicago, Tillman says he sold 50 kilos of crack a week and collected about $9 million a month from just about every street gang. Marine Drive, “surrounded by white folks with great jobs.”
When Tillman returned to Chicago - the self-proclaimed “son of a hustler” who grew up in Englewood surrounded by players, pimps and drug dealers who frequented neighborhood pool halls and his aunt’s restaurant, “Helen’s Barbecue” - quickly became a crack-selling millionaire. He played a big role in Ross’s cocaine operation but managed to escape the spotlight and prison time by conducting business in Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, New York and lesser cities in Indiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Arkansas, among other places.
Marines and got a scholarship to play the sport at The Citadel - dropped out of college to sell crack. Tillman - who met Ross playing high school tennis in Los Angeles, served in the U.S. Mark Konkol says the respect Tillman commands helps him reach those affected by addiction: In the documentary by filmmaker Marc Levin (with whom I worked on the CNN docu-series "Chicagoland"), Tillman plays a supporting role in explaining Ross’s early years as a crack dealer. ghettos.Īnd now, Ross’s story is featured in two movies: the feature film “Kill The Messenger,” starring Jeremy Renner, and a soon-to-be-released documentary that’s already getting a lot of buzz, “Freeway: Crack In The System.” Ross was an important source in late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb’s controversial series, “Dark Alliance,” which alleged a link between the CIA and the flood of cocaine in L.A. The crack trade made him rich, landed him near the center of the Iran-Contra Affair and got him two life sentences, both of which were reduced. The cocaine-trafficking career of Ross is legendary.
In the late 1980s, the native Chicagoan helped flood his hometown - and a handful of other big cities - with crack cocaine distributed by his best pal, Los Angeles drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross. ENGLEWOOD - Norman Tillman lives with regret.
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