Before Freeway Rick Ross, before the Crips and Bloods turned the streets into a war zone, and long before crack cocaine turned Los Angeles into a battlefield, one man ruled the black underworld. His name was Thomas “Tootie” Reese, and he was the original kingpin of Los Angeles, the first Black man in the city to run a large-scale narcotics operation on a level no one had ever seen. He built an empire that made him a millionaire, but he was eventually undone by the very world he helped create. When the younger generation arrived in the 1980s, the “Ricks” and the “Monsters” with Colombian connections and automatic weapons, Tootie was nothing anymore.
The king was gone, replaced by a newer, bloodier era of the drug trade. Donald Goines lived the life he wrote about. A heroin addict and a hustler, he turned his street knowledge into a literary career that produced 16 novels in just four years. Books like *Dope Fiend*, *Whoreson*, *Black Gangster*, and *Never Die Alone* painted a raw, unfiltered picture of pimps, dealers, and addicts that had never been captured on paper before.
Tupac Shakur was developing a film about Goines’s life before his own murder. But while Goines’s books remain in print 50 years after his death, he never saw a dollar from his legacy. He was actively using drugs while he wrote, and his life ended in tragedy when he was shot dead while sitting at his typewriter. The case was never solved.
Goines died broke, addicted, and murdered, his death a final, brutal sentence that mirrored the souls he wrote about. The man who was supposed to be saved by his own words was instead destroyed by them. In the 1970s and 1980s, four brothers—Billy Joe, Larry, Otis, and Willie Chambers—built one of the most profitable drug operations in Detroit’s history. Rising from Mariana, Arkansas, they turned Detroit’s East Side into a crack empire so organized that the US Senate called it one of the most sophisticated criminal enterprises outside of the Italian Mafia.
At its peak, the operation was making a million dollars a day. But the feds were coming. All four brothers were arrested in a single coordinated raid that dismantled their empire. Billy Joe Chambers was sentenced to life without parole, though his sentence was later reduced and he was released in 2020 after serving more than 30 years.
Chambers and his brothers had climbed from sharecropping poverty to the top of the drug world, but they learned the same lesson as every kingpin before them: the money always leaves before you do. Frank Lucas claimed he made $1 million a day at his peak. The DEA estimated his net worth at $52 million, most of it hidden in Cayman Islands banks. He was the man from Harlem and New Jersey who built an empire that made him a legend.
He attended the NBA All-Star Weekend every year with an entourage and dropped $450,000 at a single Georgetown clothing store. Then it all came crashing down. Frank Lucas was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He cooperated with prosecutors and gave them over 100 names.
While in prison, he was caught dealing heroin again in 1984, though on a much smaller scale. He served seven more years before the wheel turned again. In 2012, the man whose net worth was once $52 million, the man Denzel Washington played in American Gangster, was caught trying to cash a $17,000 federal disability check twice. By then, his first empire was gone, and he was broke.
He was sentenced to five years probation because prosecutors felt sorry for him. Frank Lucas died on May 30, 2019, in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, having learned the final lesson: the money leaves before you do. Nicky Barnes was the godfather of the black underworld. He was one of the most visible Black men in New York City, moving between the criminal underworld and the entertainment world as if he owned both.
He worked the Apollo Theater when Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, and Stevie Wonder took the stage. He owned nightclubs, real estate, and legitimate businesses across the city. Then Nicky Barnes cooperated with prosecutors. He gave the feds 109 names, and one of them was Leroy “Nicky” Barnes himself.
He was convicted in 1985 on drug trafficking and murder charges and sentenced to life without parole. His real estate was seized, and the empire that once made him a king was gone. From a $17,000 house to a cartel mansion to a federal prison cell for the rest of his life, Barnes watched it all disappear. He left behind a legacy that ended the same way it began: with nothing.
Maurice Phillips was a kingpin who didn’t fit the prototype. He moved millions in cash, and one witness described spending two days counting $3 million in a North Jersey basement. That was just one counting session. He ran his empire until his girlfriend, Channel Cunningham, his business partner and lover, flipped and gave the feds everything—names, amounts, locations.
Phillips was sentenced to life in prison. At his sentencing, he lashed out at a “flawed and tainted” justice system, showing no remorse. He died in prison, a man who had once risen to the top of the underworld, only to lose it all to the system and the people he trusted. Rick “Freeway” Ross built an empire that made millions.
He was arrested, sentenced to life, and spent years in prison before his sentence was reduced. When he got out, he moved between living in his car and sleeping at his mother’s house. The people who once lined up to get close to him wouldn’t return his calls. Every dollar he had made was gone, siphoned into lawyers’ fees and government seizures.
And then the final insult: while Ross was in federal prison, a former corrections officer named William Roberts took his name and became the rapper Rick Ross. The new Ross sold millions of records using the real Ross’s identity. The real Ross sued for $10 million but never recovered his name or his money. Frank Lucas was the man who claimed he made a million dollars a day.
He cooperated with the feds, gave up over 100 names, and in exchange, the government released his mother, who was serving a 14-year sentence. But the money, the empire, and the legend were all gone. He spent his final years in obscurity, broke and forgotten.
In the end, every kingpin learned the same lesson: the money always leaves before you do.