Black Star: Urban Culture and Its Impact

In 1999, a company was created that brought forth a new wave of urban products from the streets, now known as street documentaries, hood movies, hip-hop DVDs, books and magazines called street bottles. Since then, this phenomenon has exploded from the hoods across America to to TV and now to Hollywood with big budget movies with major stars. Ten years later, the company that brought you all of that stands strong as a leader in distributing these urban products around the world. No one else comes close. That company that put the... the culture of the urban lifestyle on the map black star we started built and dominate this industry black star help bring you the street classics like the game over the life of ray for edmunds carlton hines the original 50 cent and the guy fisher story blackstarvideo.com is considered the number one website in the country where you can order all of your urban dvds black star knows more and carries more street documentaries hood movies hip-hop dvds books and magazines than Any time. company around to place an order with a wholesale or retail call us toll free at 1-888-252-2595 or hit us online at www.blackstarvideo.com we ship all around the world including the correctional facilities come visit black star music and videos flagship store right here in harlem new york 352 west 128th street and lenox ave black star music and video Street Stars has been a journey, man. When you run a business, man, it's like every day, you're a day away from the whole thing failing. And people don't see that end of the business, man. They don't see that end of the business. business to where you get up and you take your last dime, your last dime to get on the plane, man. And because you got a phone call that somebody's, you know, that somebody's willing to do an interview. So, Safe Fences, if Alpo called me to say, yo, Troy. I'm willing to do an interview with you I gotta now get on a plane Scrap up whatever I got to get on a plane To go to wherever this man is located To go see him in prison or do this interview And that course, man I mean, you may lose something in the process of paying for that So most people don't see that, man So it's like I come here every day Just to keep my mind right You know what I'm saying? Just to keep my mind right To wake up every day with a positive attitude, man Because if not this whole thing a fold. We are in the heart of one of Washington's black neighborhoods. Get him out of there. Spread your legs, huh? This country has the ability to go to other countries and destabilize countries, start revolutions, but they can't stop the drug problem. I would think that you would be happy to hear a white man get up and say, wait a second folks, this is not just the black user, this is not just the black dealer. They have always used black folks to experiment on us. 300,000 pounds of cocaine comes into America every year. Raefel Edmond III, the man who was accused by the U.S. Attorney's Office in this town of being responsible for bringing a ton of cocaine into this city on an annual basis. He is helping to carry out this one plan, and that is the genocide plan of the African American people. They're killing our youth at 13 and 14 and 15. They simply aren't being buried until they're 30 and 35 and 40. This city, the drug of choice is pure cocaine. Ray was bringing probably about 500 to 1,000 keys into D.C. His family business sold one ton of cocaine. Lots of it. The price is low. The demand is high. Dude popped his trunk and made about 50. 15 guys was coming like this right here. When it did come, I'm counting them on the card. He said, all them birds, those are birds. When I counted that shit, I just was like, god damn. Early now and then, you're gonna have a drought somewhere. He never had a drought. Ray was just bag that shit up raw. Just like he got it from whoever gay he got it from. The coke back then was so pure, man, you couldn't shoot it off. It was like, hit it and put it down. You sell your mama house and you don't need money. I'll tell you, any female artist that shit, you never suck a dick or fuck the wood out before that, she lying. That's how good it was. It had to be like 78, 90 people on both sides of the street. The blocks was long, it was like lunch time. You know how you stand at the truck, get your lunch meal and shit right? Lines was the way, because shift changes. We had this guy, man, that made up some beat bags that looked just like coke. We came out with like $4,000 worth of dummies. And man, we would hit these people's man in a matter of, I'm going to say five minutes. Sometimes, man, we had to shoot people in the leg, man, just to get the lines straight. In the resort, I got shot in my leg. Police used to get in the line. That's a hand in the pocket for a baby. Man, you can check the code, you know. Understand, people wasn't getting, you know, in line getting drugged, wasn't getting drugged to get high. He made room for the smokers and the sellers. It's going to be triple the size of whoever else got some. Both of us getting drugged to resell. Man, when you shoot that code, it just took me, man, like space. That's supposed to be the final frontier for most people. We had this whole setup like a... Fortune 500 company. He had that mindset where he could tell people, this is what we're going to pay you at the end of the week. People work all week knowing that you might not make it through the week. He set it up for us like eight-hour shifts. You know, almost like a job. You know, that's when he was like 19. You got a morning shift, you got an evening shift. And the crew in the morning would be from 7 to 3. The crew in the evening would be 3 to 11. And then 11 to 7. Ray was so organized that... He had a lieutenant on every shift. And some of us wanted to make more money. We stayed on it, we worked for this one. And then when the next shift over, they gone home. We work and come on with the next person's shift. So in each shift, we might have been doing 9, 10 keys a day, man. I'm telling you, man. Once it got to that point where he started implementing three shifts, he knew it was then a business. This shit was organized. It was around like a business. Exactly like a business. He's like a Bill Gates type of guy. Listen, I'm going to build Microsoft, and I'm going to get five or six people around me, and that's how we're going to do this. And I'm going to be at the top. He put everybody on a salary. Everybody started getting on a salary of $1,000 a week. He knew who owed what, how much it should have been. He could remember deals, transactions, to, you know, the penny and the kilos. Sometimes I used to be writing shit down. He'd be like, oh, you want to do that shit? Every Sunday night. They go in the house, count the money, they separate the money. You should line up on 40, 50 people outside. And come out and give everybody a thousand dollars. And just go down the line and pay every last one. So that go 35,000 right there. You know what I'm saying? That he paying the runners. The empire that he made illegitimately and that he built illegitimately, just think of what he could have done legitimately. He used to always say he was going to be successful. We didn't know how he was going to be successful. But he always say he was gonna be successful this way back in high school. Breaking books smart for one. Through school he always was like an A and B student. Was good in reading, math, thinking, logic. I couldn't even understand basic English and he could. He listened very well. He had very good listening skills. He always paid attention to detail. I think he knew all the components, all the inner... indicators that will lead a person to success. Rayford was one of those children that was born with the gift to be smart. And because of it, yeah, he had the edge on everybody else. He really did have... an exceptionally sharp intellect. It was easy to see that he can incorporate his intelligence into what he was doing. He would have had the edge if he had gone to Harvard and Yale and any ivory league school. He would have had the edge if he had gone to a Fortune 500 company. You can't really be a dummy and do what he did. I don't think anybody has ever monopolized the drug trade to that extent before or or after Raefel. You turn the tremendous intellect and leadership skills into building a criminal organization, the likes of which Washington, DC had never seen. This man was a superstar in this town coming out of the 12th grade. I dreamed of you this morning, then came the dawn, and I thought you were here with me. Rafe O. Edmond III walked down any street in Northeast Washington, and people will tell you here, he was the rain. Today, one LA gang has become the major supplier of crack cocaine in Washington, D.C. When Rafel got his cocaine connections and crack exploded. I met with me first man Melvin Buck. You know what I mean? He was chill. They was on some game shit. Prosecutors say Butler was Edmunds' West Coast cocaine connection. Me and him took a trip to L.A. And when we got to L.A., Melvin gave us like $50,000. So Ray, he basically gave me about $20,000. So we was up there for about a week. But when Melvin come to D.C. You got the California dudes down here. Me, Melvin, Whitey. I'm I mean, our whole little crew, we woke like three cars deep. Ray basically counted the money out. Brog come out back and just throw two tennis shoes, little drawstring bags in the background. He gave him like $200,000, you know what I'm saying, for him and his buddies to spend down here. We get up here, we get a store called Players that shut down. I'm like, man, we get in this joint. The man who owned the store shut the door, locked it, just let us stay in the joint. And I'm like, man, listen, man. I knew he had to spend like $50,000 in cash just in closing at one time on one shopping spree. You know, I was thinking that Melvin had more money than Ray. So I was asking Ray, I was like, man, why we give him all this money when he come to town? And he only give us $50,000 when we come to town. He was like, he was basically, you know, he had basically broken down to me. He was like, look at, he was like, look at me go. He was like... I got more money than he got, but he got more drugs than I got. He's like, we really need each other. You know what I'm saying? He need me, and I need him. The first time I really realized how much money he was getting, you know, a thousand bricks. Take a look at this stuff. This is all junk that they brought in in the last 24 hours. The numbers we got out of DEA, I believe, was 11,000 to 14,000 kilograms. You're talking about incredible value of... narcotic. Ray was hitting the whole DC man. He just emerged. He ran DC. As you know the premier drug trafficking person in DC. The question always has been where the hell do you have all the keys in? The deal was coming together. He was giving this person over here 200 keys. He was giving this person 100 keys. He was giving this person 50 keys. He was giving this person 100 keys and before you know it all Oh All the keys is gone, so whatever he bring in, then we... That shit'll be gone quick. They brought in millions and millions of dollars, enough to fill a jury box. I mean, ones and fives and tens. When he first initially started out, a lot of the... The king pimps is older. And older guys used to just sit back and just talk to us and tell us certain things. And we'd just sit around and be in awe as to what they were talking about. And he took all that in. You know, he's done what a lot of old-timers probably could have done. what they were scared to do. Hey, you got a younger guy coming in, you know, with a lot of more younger people, a lot of more younger soldiers willing to do anything and everything to, you know, to be big. He had scores of... People, young men, who wanted to be Raefel Edmonds' protégés. You didn't want to fuck with Ray, man. Ray has some motherfuckers around him, man, that will do anything, man. It was almost like he had security. He had a body. that he really didn't want around him, but he had it around him anyway. That would kill for Raefel. Just because somebody disrespected Raefel in a social setting. If, uh, Ray would get into a verbal misunderstanding, That would be our opportunity to basically show our loyalty to him. Rayville didn't have to say anything. Columbus Daniels, at the time, 19 years old. Look at Nat. Nat was loyal. He'd pull it out on nine and just unload. Even though Ray didn't want that, we was bringing that anyway. They put a program on Channel 5 called City Under Siege. What you're about to see, the first part of our series, may be disturbing. If the kids are still awake, discretion is advised. In January, I shot like six people. So... Ray, he was really like upset with me. You know, because me and him was hanging together real tight, plus I was living with him. Three months later, at that same club, I turned around and shoot 11 people. He really poured out to me, man. He was like, man, you really hurt me, man. You know, you hurt me more than you did help me. So he was almost like crying because he was at a place that he didn't want to be. He knew that what I'd done... Was basically drawing too much attention. And it seemed like Ray called him the killer. That's all you see on TV. You can turn to any channel and when the news come on, talking about drugs and violence and somebody dead and somebody got killed because it was drug related. Even if it wasn't drug related, they said, it was drug related. He said, I never really expected this to be this way, man. I say, man, you say you're going to make a million dollars, and then you're just going to get out of it. Rayford got to a point where he almost couldn't stop. He said, man, I'm ready to quit right now and go ahead and go to college, man, on this scholarship. He said, man, I got three or four people that want to offer me scholarships and stuff, man. He said, because, man, I really don't want nobody else getting hurt. But he said, man, I'm in it too deep now, man. The drug activity had taken on a life of its own. From ABC News, this is a special edition of Nightline. D.C. Divided City, a national town meeting. We are not here to talk only about drugs and violence in Washington. The problem is... a national one. Washington has merely become the symbol. When you look at the faces of the people who are addicted to drugs, my brother has tried three, four, five times to get off track. But man, why, man, why somehow? Somehow I started using it, man. And, man, I'm going to tell you, man, it reduced me, man. You know, it reduced me, man. I had to leave my job, man, on hold just to get my package, man. I ended up smoking crack, shooting dope. I mean, these scars are proof. We don't have the planes in the African-American country, I mean, communities. We don't have the ships that bring them over. We don't even ship the guns over here, but we find hold of them because they've been dropped right in the hands of the African-American community as a plan to destroy. You're talking about a plan. It seems that blacks are expendable here. Whose plan? Recently, the mayor went to a downtown hotel to visit a suspected drug user. What happened? I'm in tuning a lot, and I'm in doing that too. The white men say, well, hey, we don't have to kill these niggas anymore. What we do now is pump the drugs into their black community. That's what's going on. Put the drugs in the black community and let them kill theyself. Talk about the American dream. Well, it's become a nightmare for blacks here. We don't have the American dream. When you look out at these white picket fences, the key word is white picket fences. I don't know where to look My words just break and melt Please just save me from this darkness Please just save me from this darkness And I don't know where to look It's just breaking out. Please just save me from this darkness. Please just save me from this darkness. Those who are part of the drug ring and those who are bringing the product in will be severely prosecuted and sentenced for long terms. The law will act. I think there came a time when Rafe knew. That an investigation was being conducted by the government. You know, Ray got information from somebody in the court system, the federal government, and was like, they got a secret indictment going down next month, and they're coming to get us on this such-and-such date. We was like under 24 hours of them. Toward the end, they recognized that they were being intercepted. Their calls were being intercepted. FBI. Right. Okay, That phone is monitoring us. So they would provide little codes on the phone to stop, to warn each other not to talk openly on the phone about drugs. I see the gun in there, we've seen three or four ounces of coke in the place. Everybody got an assignment. Has anybody didn't get an assignment? Everywhere I would go, when I would sit there and play, I'd think that somebody was the police, and try to brush it, it was the police. You know, they was following. And like, if it narrowed down to it, they wouldn't hide it. They would show it. go stay in the hotel, they sit outside. Come out, they follow you. Race is way over there. What's up? We're going to take all the cars, we're going to go to the park. Leave the cars that we're not using so it's a little more secure area. We're going to caravan. He said, I'm not going to run, I'm not going to hide. He said, I'm just going to face it. And then, the day when they came, you didn't see them. April 15th, 1989. That's the big takedown day. We recovered all the drugs that you see in front of me here. Approximately 13,000 pounds of it. Five largest seizures of cocaine in California history. You could be watching a movie on TV and they have paused the movie and say, Breaking News! Rafal Edmund, who was once called the biggest drug dealer in Washington, D.C. This was a case with a big enough target for the FBI to be interested. When you look at all of the agencies involved. See, this isn't like the Isle of the North. North case where America was virtually evenly divided on whether they thought Ali was a criminal or hero. It isn't like the Watergate case where party lines determine how you felt about it or the Iran-Contra scandal. The world will be watching, the United States will be watching in terms of how that criminal justice system works. I mean, is it a real trial? Will it be free of intimidation? D.C. is watching a test case. Unfortunately, the war on drugs has been focused mainly on the black community. Billy Murphy used to be a judge. So, he, you know, he was a Baltimore judge, a good ass judge. He was arguing with the judge at the time. His name was Richard McGinnis. I mean, he let us know, you could tell from just him talking, his personal experiences, that my son died of crack. You know what I mean? And when he said that to me, I was like, that's guilty. No matter what. According to police, Edmund was so powerful and so dangerous, the jury in his trial had to sit behind bulletproof glass, their identities hidden from the public for their own safety. They had an anonymous jury panel so that the jurors' names and addresses weren't put on the jury list as they do in any other trial. The judge received a note from one of the jurors' spouses saying that they had recognized you their spouse on the news from the sketch and the judge said before we begin i would like to make a request of the media that they not draw the likenesses so accurately everything they do or anywhere they go they can't even come in con if they go sit in the restaurant and eat they can't even come in contact with another person that's sitting there a marshal coming between you can't talk to nobody or you can't say this or you can't say that let me see if i understand the judge In open court said to the assembled artists, including yourself, we not be as accurate in sketching the individual jurors. Have you ever had a judge do that? You've covered a number of cases. Never. Never had that, nor have I ever had an anonymous jury. This is very strange. They weren't scared of the judge. No, he was real polite. You know, showed them a lot of respect and that I'm not here to appreciate. I'm sitting here as a juror, you know, through this long trial. And they weren't scared of the prosecutors because they weren't on trial. They were just doing their job. They were at work every day. So the only person in the courtroom to be scared of, they weren't scared of defense attorneys because they were doing their job. Every day, only people in the courtroom to be scared of or think all this is for can be the defendants. Were you surprised at that? I was surprised, yeah, yeah. But there have been a lot of surprises in this case. It's been very, very unusual. Within a week, Raefel Edmond, who'd been held with the rest of the defendants at the D.C. jail, was transferred to Quantico, flown there daily by helicopter. They put on what's colloquially known as a... full court press. Every power they had, they used. Rafele's aunt, Armarita Perry, helped raise him. She's in jail now, too, for conspiring to distribute cocaine. Prosecutors love to charge conspiracy because it gives them all sorts of advantages. legal advantages. This is a dynamite statute for prosecutors. It permits you to bring in the comprehensive criminal conduct of an organization. You know, Rafer would come to my house all hours of the night. He would get me up to cook for him, or he would have the dude there cutting hair for him because all the children had their own keys, you know, because it's a family home. One of the ways that the government misuses the conspiracy law is that you can introduce in a conspiracy case. where two people or three people are charged evidence that relates only to one person. You're liable for anything that one of your fellow conspirators does, as if you did it yourself. They talk about giving me 20 years in jail for something I didn't do. It's wrong. And somebody out there has got to know and help us. We have thousands of people. serving a lot more time than they should. That's completely irrational. What do you make of the wreckage of the family with your daughter now facing a trial, with grandchildren facing trial in jail? Five grandchildren. Involved in the case? Six grandchildren. When Randall was on trial, I would say about two days before I was to go to court to testify for a wreckage. way. FBI agents came to my house. When your office and the U.S. Attorney's Office called two of the coaches' players in, why'd you call them in? You know, they let me know that I wasn't in no trouble, but they just wanted me to know my situation, that if I testified that my basketball career was over. If I didn't... You know, they wasn't going to bother me. You know, hey, you still can go on. And I chose to testify for Ray. Our kids went back to play with their neighbors. They didn't go back to play with drug dealers, and I think we got to understand that. To make a long story short, I was a Division II All-American. I was a player of the year, and there were two camps I was supposed to go to. I didn't find out about the camps. until it was over with. I got my invitation when it was over with. So my coach, my college coach, then he knew what it was about and I knew what it was about. Well essentially I think what happens is we try to build an intelligence base and we work from that particular intelligence base. And one of the primary things that we need and we ask the community to assist us in It is providing the kind of information. We're not out there 24 hours a day. But what made you call those two young men in? You really have to have cooperators. You really need people on the inside. Because the whole organization, it's illegal. Edmund has insisted that the witnesses who testified against him, his former friends and fellow drug dealers, were lying to save their own skins. But there was one inadvertent witness. Not even Edmund could disavow. What about your mother? My mother? Your mother, on tape, talking about you. I don't know if she was talking about me or who she was talking about. I tell you, I gotta say that as a prosecutor, that has got to be some very, very powerful evidence. When you hear, when you can show jurors evidence of... The defendants sitting across the room at the table, talking drugs, discussing drugs, that's very, very powerful. Edmund's unsuspecting mother talked at a local restaurant with a friend, a friend who had agreed to wear a wire for the prosecution. You know, like he was doing hand-in-hand coming, him and Johnny, on the corner, and then he's selling, so they were getting involved. Right. And then, just got to the end, he just went out on his own. So listening to Bootsy, the defendant's own mother, who was also convicted co-conspirator, talk to Alter A. Zanfield about Raphael Edmond and how he got started in the drug business and how he got so huge in the drug business, it's got to be devastating. It's as devastating, it's more devastating than having his mother cooperating as a government witness on the stand. testifying against him. Bray was real fucked up with them locking his mother, you know what I mean, out of anybody. Because actually, she had shit to do with nothing that we done. You know what I mean? It was just his mom. And the feds, I guess they feel, we snatch her ass up and throw her in on this conspiracy that'll make him give us something. You know what I mean? But Bray mom the whole time, son, stay on your ground. We're going to beat this case and end the story. The jury found Edmund guilty of a massive drug conspiracy and sentenced him to life without parole. I always knew throughout the whole trial that we was going to get found guilty. The FBI got a tip from an informant that Raefel was setting up deals from the prison at Lewisburg. He couldn't have been there for but two months before we started hearing. Everybody was moving nowhere. Everybody was selling wine. Colombians are teaming up with Mexicans. They know the raw stuff is coming in in record amounts. And they're flooding the border region with cocaine. They're getting shit sent down through the Y. Coming through the ceiling, you know what I'm saying? He made friends with a Colombian who was a serious, serious dealer. Everybody was giving money to Lewisburg. He wasn't the only one. Even the people that we've arrested ten years ago and went away for a heavy time, five, six, eight years, they're back and they're selling again. The clever Edmund had simply moved his office to the penitentiary. Lewisburg became an office to work at, to deal with. The Colombian reached out to his contacts and Raefel to his and they put the two together and they orchestrated major drug deals from inside Lewisburg. Imagine our frustration. We had spent all this effort and law enforcement and all this taxpayer's money to identify his organization and him, prosecute him, get him all locked up. They got huge sentences under federal sentencing guidance. And here he is in prison, becoming a larger drug dealer than he had when he was in the street. He's doing the same thing for prison? What is this? And we kept thinking back to something we saw a few weeks ago, earlier this month, when Edmund was taken out of the courtroom to jail for the last time. He walked confidently toward the police helicopter, turned and mouthed these words, look closely, Rafe Edmund said, I'll be back. It is now more than an embarrassment. Guess who his cellmate was? His cellmate at USP Lewisburg was the third largest cocaine dealer in the world. Chicky Osvaldo Trujillo Blanco. One of the sons of Griselda Blanco, who was one of the original founders of the company. He's sitting on top of a family empire in Colombia manufacturing coke. Rafel knew when he was back on the street. He made all these connections of drug dealers. And now he had a customer base. What does it say about the ability to wage a war on drugs? When you put away a kingpin and there are just as many drugs on the street. There was a lot of guys in DC that were still being supplied by Rafel. We hadn't locked all them up. So the connection between Rafel and Chickie. was a natural business one, which we couldn't have foreseen in a million years that that would happen in prison. Communication between the capitals of Colombia, one of the drug-producing centers of the world, and the United States, one of the drug-consuming centers of the world, exists on two levels. Chicky would make a phone call to his family in Colombia and order up kilos. To be shipped directly to people that Ray Feldman designated. Ray Feldman then became a big power broker. The phone was a thing that's a major commodity. Ray would get dudes that maybe, by himself or the commissary, to come out at the count and sign up on the phone list. If we get 15 minute spots, he might block off an hour and a half, so he'd go talk on the phone. Ray's longest session on the phone was two hours and fifty-some minutes. three hours non-stop. Ready to pick your phone up and get a call. Get your half a million, 200,000. I've seen him do it. And he talked to over 50 people in three hours around the country and outside the country. So it was pretty phenomenal. One corrections department official said that some of the inmates and staffers here are treating Rafe Letman like a godfather. I don't like that, I'd rather be just an ordinary prisoner. I don't wanna be looked at like I'm different than any other human being that's in jail. I'm just like them, I'm in jail right now. We go eat lunch and I go on to, we go to Lewisburg, a chat hall. So I see the big dudes through there and I'm like, man, anybody from DC working on the line? He was like, yeah. He said, yeah, how are you from DC? So I said, yeah. Can you tell Ray is cold in the night and Troy, he comes to the window, what's up, you all right down there? I'm like, dude, that's Rayford, that's Rayford. So I'm like, that's the dude Ray down there. So I'm like, damn, I come from being a nobody to a motherfucker mace. They like, Shawty, you need to see. Hey, look, I wasn't even watching TV at the time. That's how big the door. I'm laid back in the cup, me and the old head is going my way. I'm up front like this now. Officials are apparently getting concerned about what kind of power Raefel Edmond might be wielding from jail. Osvaldo Trujillo Blanco, who had been incarcerated in Lewisburg, had finished his time and had returned to Columbia. He will remain hidden now and will continue to run his vast cocaine empire in Columbia's outlying region. Because of his connection with Chicky, Rafel controlled something like 40% of the cocaine traffic in the Indies. DC at the time. Rayful could have 20, 30, 40 kilos at a time shipped to a friend of his choice to DC. And huge, that was huge power. There were several occasions when the individuals who Ray connected to chicken to receive drugs, Lost the drugs, or simply just didn't pay for them. You know, I'm inside, but he goes, 30 joints. I need this. And they not paying you nothing. They saying, fuck you. If Ray bring in a thousand keys, 50 of them keys, right, people won't even pay him for them. You see what I'm saying? People won't even pay him the money. It was... several million dollars owed to Chickie because of drugs. And I remember listening to the phone calls, and Chickie is absolutely irate against them, complaining to Ray about them. That's why I say he was a businessman, because the average person, they wouldn't, man, if you took one key or if you took five keys, man, that was enough to get your head hit. But he did not in any way hold Ray responsible in any of the problems that occurred. And problems occurred routinely. Edmund's drug activities, while incarcerated, surpassed in volume and in scope the drug distribution network that he developed and ran prior to his imprisonment. The government are the good guys, and they don't want to be perceived as contributing to the problem. They want to contribute to the solution. and by allowing drugs to be used. to reach the street, they are becoming part of the problem. The besieged governments of the drug-producing countries are fighting back, fighting to break the international drug rings. Two years after Colombia and the United States joined forces to crush the cocaine cartels, Medellin, home of Colombia's most violent cocaine cartel, is being called the murder capital of the world. If Americans use cocaine or smoke marijuana or kill somebody in Colombia then Americans are paying for murder. After people who end up in the morgue are murdered. The kingpins who have been driving this drug trafficking are being treated with kid gloves by the Colombian government. Chicky was killed, assassinated basically, as a result of an argument over money or drugs or both that someone had with Oswaldo's mother. He had called in. He began to talk about, you know, where he was. Ray was pretty devastated by the news on the phone. And not just because he lost his connection, because clearly they were close friends and that affected him. He took it upon himself, man, to try to get out of it, but he couldn't. Because it was like he was in too deep. There were a number of problems with his people in the street who didn't... pay for the drugs that he received from Chickie. That put his back against the wall, you know? That put him in there, you know, he got to deal with the little situation. So it was like, man, you know, they left me for dead, you know what I'm saying? So with Chickie gone, other people in Columbia wanted to collect that money. And they weren't as lenient with Ray as far as him being responsible for his people not paying the bill. So there was some dissatisfaction. It's like a rat trapped in a corner. You know, his only way out is death or, you know, one way or another. Ray would send out a message to him, you guys don't pay me, you're coming here with me. When they finally got wind of the prison-based operation involving Colombian drug suppliers, they eavesdropped on Edmund's phone calls. When confronted, Edmund confessed. And helped authorities set up his alleged associates. I remember the day when Ray got taken off the compound to go work with the government. When I just came back in from the weight power working out. And I came upstairs to fuck with him, do my usual. We talked for about 30, 40 minutes about some bullshit, what's going on. And then when I went downstairs to take a shower, take a nap, no, take a shower, read a book for about 30 minutes. Went back upstairs to fuck with him. It was about 3.15, I didn't see him. We asked the Bureau of Prisons to... Take him out of the prison, I believe they did it on a ruse of some kind. And we had him brought to a hotel too far from the prison. What the fuck is going on? There was no food in the microwave cooking. I didn't see him sitting with his ass eating. So I went to his room to look for him. I didn't see him. Then a whole bunch of people kept coming to me and said, Yo, where Ray at? Where Ray at, B.A.? These are very sharp guys. They know that once Ray Fuller is gone, he can't come back. Everybody's going to be in his business. What happened? What did you do? What did you say while you were gone? We just simply started to discuss with Ray and present Ray with the evidence we had against him. How long we'd been investigating him. They played the tapes for him. was his voice saying of drug deals. Did you get any money already? Did you get any money? We had the undercover officer there that you could meet and see who he'd actually been for drugs with. He knew. I mean, as they say on the street, he knew what time it was. He knew there was no beating that, and he was down for a life sentence. Anyway, what could he do? I'm already locked up for the rest of my life. They say I'm not coming home. Okay, I'm going to say what I need to say and get my mother to come home. I mean, there are people you know probably would do the same thing. Somewhere down the line, you get tired. You look and reality sets that this ain't the way I want to be. It was a very emotional time. You know, he was very sorrowful again. He said he was sorry. You know, discipline. Ray teared up a lot. That got to him. Everybody is human, no matter what type of tough exterior. They try to represent, you know, people as human. You're not robots. Regardless of how tough you try to be on the street, how tough you try to be in prison. If Ray wanted to be a rat, when his mother got him, when his mother, the woman he loved more than life, Constance Bootsy Purr, the woman he loved more than life itself, if he wanted to be a rat, he'd have ratted them to get his mother and his sister. He loved his sister's deal. He would have never wanted to see his mother and his sister in concert in his honor. So something forced him to do what he's done, to do what he did. Because why would he spend 18 years in some of the most dangerous prisons in the world? Just because he liked it? No. Because of the honor and the code he was living under. But something forced him to, after 17, 18 years, to wake up and say, Okay, I'm going to tell you. No. We were very surprised that Raefel was hoping this. I have no problem using snitches. You have to prove the cases under our system of laws. He told us that he'd been thinking about this. He'd already made a decision that when they stepped to him, he was going to cooperate. He, at one point, said, what do you want me to do? When he made up his mind to do something and he signed the plea agreement and he gave his word, he did it. And when he did that, he knew that he then had to place his survivability in the hands of law enforcement. We arranged for him to call us elected. A cover apartment, and then instead of his friends and family three waiting phone calls, we were three waiting the phone call for him. You beep your source, he gets back to you on the number, you make your arrangements, and it's normally by public telephones, which make interception by electronic surveillance. And that's how we sounded out, they would call me and I would call back. No one thought that they would ever go to jail. No one ever thought that they would go to jail. Not even me. The way he got them dudes, come on man. I say this even when I was in before I came a thousand times. Why? How can you be mad with him? Yeah, you say you mad. How can you be mad because you sit there thinking like this? How you gonna sit here and owe a dude at this day and time, 30,000, and let him call me back up and say, don't worry about that. Come on and come and see me. We arranged meetings with, I believe, eight different, six or eight different individuals. who wanted a connection for drugs from Ray. Okay, Ernie, we're all set. In Columbia, South America, a drug trafficker cut a deal to smuggle nearly 700 pounds of cocaine to Miami. I believe there were eight different separate deals all taken down in one day. He didn't know the men he had hired to transport the drugs were undercover U.S. customs agents who seized the shipment. It's one of the most successful and one of the most feared drug kinpings in Colombia has given himself up. I've been doing this for 25 years and that's the largest seizure of drugs I've ever seen in my life and it gave me really cold chills when I walked in and looked at it and the magnitude of it has really not sunk into me yet. As many of you may know, Jose Ali Lopez Chacon of Bogota, Colombia, boarded a plane bound to Miami this morning at 11 o'clock Eastern Time. Upon deplaning in Miami, he was arrested. Sources say the agents believe the trafficker was a close associate of Pablo Escobar, leader of Colombia's notorious Medellin cocaine cartel. The capture of these three key individuals, who are top leaders of Colombian cocaine trafficking and money laundering cartels in our belief. And whom we believe include the operators of two massive drug rings in the United States. The Colombian dudes that Ray was fucking with, as well as some of their associates, was fucked up when they found out Ray was in forment. Then Leslie Klain, they might have had a hit on Ray. You don't double-cross a Colombian. No, never. Mr. Edmund is in involuntary protective custody because there have been some threats. Well, right now, it's kind of sad. Because when I'm in jail most of the time I'm separated from everybody. You know, I don't want to be locked down. He's chosen his path, which essentially puts his life and future in your hands. Because if you want to use them, as an informant, you need to protect them and keep them alive. Rayfield's going to have his family the rest of his life and he's going to have his protection program. Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and say, I'm 25 years old, and they tell me I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life here? Nah, I don't ever wake up and say that because I don't believe it. I don't believe that I'm going to spend the rest of my life in jail because I don't think that was meant for me to spend the rest of my life in jail. So I just don't look at it like that. I honestly don't believe it. I never even thought about it as far as just knowing I'm going to be there even 10 or 15 years. I just know something is going to happen good and I'm going to eventually get out. Do it all, everything, all you don't need, anything, or else If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world? I don't quite know what to say. I feel those three words are said to my

the culture of the urban lifestyle on the map black star we started built and dominate this industry black star help bring you the street classics like the game over the life of ray for edmunds carlton hines the original 50 cent and the guy fisher story blackstarvideo.com is considered the number one website in the country where you can order all of your urban dvds black star knows more and carries more street documentaries hood movies hip-hop dvds books and magazines than Any time. company around to place an order with a wholesale or retail call us toll free at 1-888-252-2595 or hit us online at www.blackstarvideo.com we ship all around the world including the correctional facilities come visit black star music and videos flagship store right here in harlem new york 352 west 128th street and lenox ave black star music and video Street Stars has been a journey, man. When you run a business, man, it's like every day, you're a day away from the whole thing failing. And people don't see that end of the business, man. They don't see that end of the business.

business to where you get up and you take your last dime, your last dime to get on the plane, man. And because you got a phone call that somebody's, you know, that somebody's willing to do an interview. So, Safe Fences, if Alpo called me to say, yo, Troy.

I'm willing to do an interview with you I gotta now get on a plane Scrap up whatever I got to get on a plane To go to wherever this man is located To go see him in prison or do this interview And that course, man I mean, you may lose something in the process of paying for that So most people don't see that, man So it's like I come here every day Just to keep my mind right You know what I'm saying? Just to keep my mind right To wake up every day with a positive attitude, man Because if not this whole thing a fold. We are in the heart of one of Washington's black neighborhoods. Get him out of there. Spread your legs, huh?

This country has the ability to go to other countries and destabilize countries, start revolutions, but they can't stop the drug problem. I would think that you would be happy to hear a white man get up and say, wait a second folks, this is not just the black user, this is not just the black dealer. They have always used black folks to experiment on us. 300,000 pounds of cocaine comes into America every year.

Raefel Edmond III, the man who was accused by the U.S. Attorney's Office in this town of being responsible for bringing a ton of cocaine into this city on an annual basis. He is helping to carry out this one plan, and that is the genocide plan of the African American people. They're killing our youth at 13 and 14 and 15. They simply aren't being buried until they're 30 and 35 and 40. This city, the drug of choice is pure cocaine.

Ray was bringing probably about 500 to 1,000 keys into D.C. His family business sold one ton of cocaine. Lots of it. The price is low. The demand is high.

Dude popped his trunk and made about 50. 15 guys was coming like this right here. When it did come, I'm counting them on the card. He said, all them birds, those are birds.

When I counted that shit, I just was like, god damn. Early now and then, you're gonna have a drought somewhere. He never had a drought. Ray was just bag that shit up raw. Just like he got it from whoever gay he got it from.

The coke back then was so pure, man, you couldn't shoot it off. It was like, hit it and put it down. You sell your mama house and you don't need money. I'll tell you, any female artist that shit, you never suck a dick or fuck the wood out before that, she lying. That's how good it was.

It had to be like 78, 90 people on both sides of the street. The blocks was long, it was like lunch time. You know how you stand at the truck, get your lunch meal and shit right?

Lines was the way, because shift changes. We had this guy, man, that made up some beat bags that looked just like coke. We came out with like $4,000 worth of dummies.

And man, we would hit these people's man in a matter of, I'm going to say five minutes. Sometimes, man, we had to shoot people in the leg, man, just to get the lines straight. In the resort, I got shot in my leg.

Police used to get in the line. That's a hand in the pocket for a baby. Man, you can check the code, you know. Understand, people wasn't getting, you know, in line getting drugged, wasn't getting drugged to get high.

He made room for the smokers and the sellers. It's going to be triple the size of whoever else got some. Both of us getting drugged to resell. Man, when you shoot that code, it just took me, man, like space. That's supposed to be the final frontier for most people.

We had this whole setup like a... Fortune 500 company. He had that mindset where he could tell people, this is what we're going to pay you at the end of the week.

People work all week knowing that you might not make it through the week. He set it up for us like eight-hour shifts. You know, almost like a job. You know, that's when he was like 19. You got a morning shift, you got an evening shift.

And the crew in the morning would be from 7 to 3. The crew in the evening would be 3 to 11. And then 11 to 7. Ray was so organized that... He had a lieutenant on every shift. And some of us wanted to make more money. We stayed on it, we worked for this one.

And then when the next shift over, they gone home. We work and come on with the next person's shift. So in each shift, we might have been doing 9, 10 keys a day, man.

I'm telling you, man. Once it got to that point where he started implementing three shifts, he knew it was then a business. This shit was organized. It was around like a business. Exactly like a business.

He's like a Bill Gates type of guy. Listen, I'm going to build Microsoft, and I'm going to get five or six people around me, and that's how we're going to do this. And I'm going to be at the top. He put everybody on a salary. Everybody started getting on a salary of $1,000 a week.

He knew who owed what, how much it should have been. He could remember deals, transactions, to, you know, the penny and the kilos. Sometimes I used to be writing shit down. He'd be like, oh, you want to do that shit? Every Sunday night.

They go in the house, count the money, they separate the money. You should line up on 40, 50 people outside. And come out and give everybody a thousand dollars. And just go down the line and pay every last one.

So that go 35,000 right there. You know what I'm saying? That he paying the runners. The empire that he made illegitimately and that he built illegitimately, just think of what he could have done legitimately.

He used to always say he was going to be successful. We didn't know how he was going to be successful. But he always say he was gonna be successful this way back in high school.

Breaking books smart for one. Through school he always was like an A and B student. Was good in reading, math, thinking, logic.

I couldn't even understand basic English and he could. He listened very well. He had very good listening skills.

He always paid attention to detail. I think he knew all the components, all the inner... indicators that will lead a person to success. Rayford was one of those children that was born with the gift to be smart.

And because of it, yeah, he had the edge on everybody else. He really did have... an exceptionally sharp intellect. It was easy to see that he can incorporate his intelligence into what he was doing.

He would have had the edge if he had gone to Harvard and Yale and any ivory league school. He would have had the edge if he had gone to a Fortune 500 company. You can't really be a dummy and do what he did. I don't think anybody has ever monopolized the drug trade to that extent before or or after Raefel. You turn the tremendous intellect and leadership skills into building a criminal organization, the likes of which Washington, DC had never seen.

This man was a superstar in this town coming out of the 12th grade. I dreamed of you this morning, then came the dawn, and I thought you were here with me. Rafe O. Edmond III walked down any street in Northeast Washington, and people will tell you here, he was the rain. Today, one LA gang has become the major supplier of crack cocaine in Washington, D.C. When Rafel got his cocaine connections and crack exploded.

I met with me first man Melvin Buck. You know what I mean? He was chill. They was on some game shit. Prosecutors say Butler was Edmunds' West Coast cocaine connection.

Me and him took a trip to L.A. And when we got to L.A., Melvin gave us like $50,000. So Ray, he basically gave me about $20,000. So we was up there for about a week.

But when Melvin come to D.C. You got the California dudes down here. Me, Melvin, Whitey. I'm I mean, our whole little crew, we woke like three cars deep. Ray basically counted the money out.

Brog come out back and just throw two tennis shoes, little drawstring bags in the background. He gave him like $200,000, you know what I'm saying, for him and his buddies to spend down here. We get up here, we get a store called Players that shut down. I'm like, man, we get in this joint.

The man who owned the store shut the door, locked it, just let us stay in the joint. And I'm like, man, listen, man. I knew he had to spend like $50,000 in cash just in closing at one time on one shopping spree.

You know, I was thinking that Melvin had more money than Ray. So I was asking Ray, I was like, man, why we give him all this money when he come to town? And he only give us $50,000 when we come to town. He was like, he was basically, you know, he had basically broken down to me. He was like, look at, he was like, look at me go.

He was like... I got more money than he got, but he got more drugs than I got. He's like, we really need each other. You know what I'm saying? He need me, and I need him.

The first time I really realized how much money he was getting, you know, a thousand bricks. Take a look at this stuff. This is all junk that they brought in in the last 24 hours. The numbers we got out of DEA, I believe, was 11,000 to 14,000 kilograms.

You're talking about incredible value of... narcotic. Ray was hitting the whole DC man.

He just emerged. He ran DC. As you know the premier drug trafficking person in DC. The question always has been where the hell do you have all the keys in? The deal was coming together.

He was giving this person over here 200 keys. He was giving this person 100 keys. He was giving this person 50 keys.

He was giving this person 100 keys and before you know it all Oh All the keys is gone, so whatever he bring in, then we... That shit'll be gone quick. They brought in millions and millions of dollars, enough to fill a jury box. I mean, ones and fives and tens. When he first initially started out, a lot of the...

The king pimps is older. And older guys used to just sit back and just talk to us and tell us certain things. And we'd just sit around and be in awe as to what they were talking about. And he took all that in.

You know, he's done what a lot of old-timers probably could have done. what they were scared to do. Hey, you got a younger guy coming in, you know, with a lot of more younger people, a lot of more younger soldiers willing to do anything and everything to, you know, to be big.

He had scores of... People, young men, who wanted to be Raefel Edmonds' protégés. You didn't want to fuck with Ray, man. Ray has some motherfuckers around him, man, that will do anything, man.

It was almost like he had security. He had a body. that he really didn't want around him, but he had it around him anyway. That would kill for Raefel.

Just because somebody disrespected Raefel in a social setting. If, uh, Ray would get into a verbal misunderstanding, That would be our opportunity to basically show our loyalty to him. Rayville didn't have to say anything.

Columbus Daniels, at the time, 19 years old. Look at Nat. Nat was loyal. He'd pull it out on nine and just unload. Even though Ray didn't want that, we was bringing that anyway.

They put a program on Channel 5 called City Under Siege. What you're about to see, the first part of our series, may be disturbing. If the kids are still awake, discretion is advised. In January, I shot like six people.

So... Ray, he was really like upset with me. You know, because me and him was hanging together real tight, plus I was living with him.

Three months later, at that same club, I turned around and shoot 11 people. He really poured out to me, man. He was like, man, you really hurt me, man. You know, you hurt me more than you did help me.

So he was almost like crying because he was at a place that he didn't want to be. He knew that what I'd done... Was basically drawing too much attention. And it seemed like Ray called him the killer. That's all you see on TV.

You can turn to any channel and when the news come on, talking about drugs and violence and somebody dead and somebody got killed because it was drug related. Even if it wasn't drug related, they said, it was drug related. He said, I never really expected this to be this way, man. I say, man, you say you're going to make a million dollars, and then you're just going to get out of it.

Rayford got to a point where he almost couldn't stop. He said, man, I'm ready to quit right now and go ahead and go to college, man, on this scholarship. He said, man, I got three or four people that want to offer me scholarships and stuff, man. He said, because, man, I really don't want nobody else getting hurt.

But he said, man, I'm in it too deep now, man. The drug activity had taken on a life of its own. From ABC News, this is a special edition of Nightline. D.C. Divided City, a national town meeting.

We are not here to talk only about drugs and violence in Washington. The problem is... a national one.

Washington has merely become the symbol. When you look at the faces of the people who are addicted to drugs, my brother has tried three, four, five times to get off track. But man, why, man, why somehow?

Somehow I started using it, man. And, man, I'm going to tell you, man, it reduced me, man. You know, it reduced me, man. I had to leave my job, man, on hold just to get my package, man. I ended up smoking crack, shooting dope.

I mean, these scars are proof. We don't have the planes in the African-American country, I mean, communities. We don't have the ships that bring them over.

We don't even ship the guns over here, but we find hold of them because they've been dropped right in the hands of the African-American community as a plan to destroy. You're talking about a plan. It seems that blacks are expendable here. Whose plan?

Recently, the mayor went to a downtown hotel to visit a suspected drug user. What happened? I'm in tuning a lot, and I'm in doing that too. The white men say, well, hey, we don't have to kill these niggas anymore. What we do now is pump the drugs into their black community.

That's what's going on. Put the drugs in the black community and let them kill theyself. Talk about the American dream.

Well, it's become a nightmare for blacks here. We don't have the American dream. When you look out at these white picket fences, the key word is white picket fences.

I don't know where to look My words just break and melt Please just save me from this darkness Please just save me from this darkness And I don't know where to look It's just breaking out. Please just save me from this darkness. Please just save me from this darkness.

Those who are part of the drug ring and those who are bringing the product in will be severely prosecuted and sentenced for long terms. The law will act. I think there came a time when Rafe knew. That an investigation was being conducted by the government. You know, Ray got information from somebody in the court system, the federal government, and was like, they got a secret indictment going down next month, and they're coming to get us on this such-and-such date.

We was like under 24 hours of them. Toward the end, they recognized that they were being intercepted. Their calls were being intercepted.

FBI. Right. Okay, That phone is monitoring us. So they would provide little codes on the phone to stop, to warn each other not to talk openly on the phone about drugs. I see the gun in there, we've seen three or four ounces of coke in the place.

Everybody got an assignment. Has anybody didn't get an assignment? Everywhere I would go, when I would sit there and play, I'd think that somebody was the police, and try to brush it, it was the police.

You know, they was following. And like, if it narrowed down to it, they wouldn't hide it. They would show it. go stay in the hotel, they sit outside.

Come out, they follow you. Race is way over there. What's up?

We're going to take all the cars, we're going to go to the park. Leave the cars that we're not using so it's a little more secure area. We're going to caravan.

He said, I'm not going to run, I'm not going to hide. He said, I'm just going to face it. And then, the day when they came, you didn't see them. April 15th, 1989. That's the big takedown day. We recovered all the drugs that you see in front of me here.

Approximately 13,000 pounds of it. Five largest seizures of cocaine in California history. You could be watching a movie on TV and they have paused the movie and say, Breaking News!

Rafal Edmund, who was once called the biggest drug dealer in Washington, D.C. This was a case with a big enough target for the FBI to be interested. When you look at all of the agencies involved. See, this isn't like the Isle of the North.

North case where America was virtually evenly divided on whether they thought Ali was a criminal or hero. It isn't like the Watergate case where party lines determine how you felt about it or the Iran-Contra scandal. The world will be watching, the United States will be watching in terms of how that criminal justice system works.

I mean, is it a real trial? Will it be free of intimidation? D.C. is watching a test case.

Unfortunately, the war on drugs has been focused mainly on the black community. Billy Murphy used to be a judge. So, he, you know, he was a Baltimore judge, a good ass judge. He was arguing with the judge at the time.

His name was Richard McGinnis. I mean, he let us know, you could tell from just him talking, his personal experiences, that my son died of crack. You know what I mean? And when he said that to me, I was like, that's guilty. No matter what.

According to police, Edmund was so powerful and so dangerous, the jury in his trial had to sit behind bulletproof glass, their identities hidden from the public for their own safety. They had an anonymous jury panel so that the jurors' names and addresses weren't put on the jury list as they do in any other trial. The judge received a note from one of the jurors' spouses saying that they had recognized you their spouse on the news from the sketch and the judge said before we begin i would like to make a request of the media that they not draw the likenesses so accurately everything they do or anywhere they go they can't even come in con if they go sit in the restaurant and eat they can't even come in contact with another person that's sitting there a marshal coming between you can't talk to nobody or you can't say this or you can't say that let me see if i understand the judge In open court said to the assembled artists, including yourself, we not be as accurate in sketching the individual jurors.

Have you ever had a judge do that? You've covered a number of cases. Never. Never had that, nor have I ever had an anonymous jury.

This is very strange. They weren't scared of the judge. No, he was real polite.

You know, showed them a lot of respect and that I'm not here to appreciate. I'm sitting here as a juror, you know, through this long trial. And they weren't scared of the prosecutors because they weren't on trial. They were just doing their job. They were at work every day.

So the only person in the courtroom to be scared of, they weren't scared of defense attorneys because they were doing their job. Every day, only people in the courtroom to be scared of or think all this is for can be the defendants. Were you surprised at that?

I was surprised, yeah, yeah. But there have been a lot of surprises in this case. It's been very, very unusual.

Within a week, Raefel Edmond, who'd been held with the rest of the defendants at the D.C. jail, was transferred to Quantico, flown there daily by helicopter. They put on what's colloquially known as a...

full court press. Every power they had, they used. Rafele's aunt, Armarita Perry, helped raise him.

She's in jail now, too, for conspiring to distribute cocaine. Prosecutors love to charge conspiracy because it gives them all sorts of advantages. legal advantages.

This is a dynamite statute for prosecutors. It permits you to bring in the comprehensive criminal conduct of an organization. You know, Rafer would come to my house all hours of the night. He would get me up to cook for him, or he would have the dude there cutting hair for him because all the children had their own keys, you know, because it's a family home.

One of the ways that the government misuses the conspiracy law is that you can introduce in a conspiracy case. where two people or three people are charged evidence that relates only to one person. You're liable for anything that one of your fellow conspirators does, as if you did it yourself.

They talk about giving me 20 years in jail for something I didn't do. It's wrong. And somebody out there has got to know and help us. We have thousands of people.

serving a lot more time than they should. That's completely irrational. What do you make of the wreckage of the family with your daughter now facing a trial, with grandchildren facing trial in jail?

Five grandchildren. Involved in the case? Six grandchildren.

When Randall was on trial, I would say about two days before I was to go to court to testify for a wreckage. way. FBI agents came to my house.

When your office and the U.S. Attorney's Office called two of the coaches' players in, why'd you call them in? You know, they let me know that I wasn't in no trouble, but they just wanted me to know my situation, that if I testified that my basketball career was over. If I didn't... You know, they wasn't going to bother me.

You know, hey, you still can go on. And I chose to testify for Ray. Our kids went back to play with their neighbors. They didn't go back to play with drug dealers, and I think we got to understand that.

To make a long story short, I was a Division II All-American. I was a player of the year, and there were two camps I was supposed to go to. I didn't find out about the camps.

until it was over with. I got my invitation when it was over with. So my coach, my college coach, then he knew what it was about and I knew what it was about. Well essentially I think what happens is we try to build an intelligence base and we work from that particular intelligence base. And one of the primary things that we need and we ask the community to assist us in It is providing the kind of information.

We're not out there 24 hours a day. But what made you call those two young men in? You really have to have cooperators. You really need people on the inside. Because the whole organization, it's illegal.

Edmund has insisted that the witnesses who testified against him, his former friends and fellow drug dealers, were lying to save their own skins. But there was one inadvertent witness. Not even Edmund could disavow.

What about your mother? My mother? Your mother, on tape, talking about you. I don't know if she was talking about me or who she was talking about.

I tell you, I gotta say that as a prosecutor, that has got to be some very, very powerful evidence. When you hear, when you can show jurors evidence of... The defendants sitting across the room at the table, talking drugs, discussing drugs, that's very, very powerful. Edmund's unsuspecting mother talked at a local restaurant with a friend, a friend who had agreed to wear a wire for the prosecution.

You know, like he was doing hand-in-hand coming, him and Johnny, on the corner, and then he's selling, so they were getting involved. Right. And then, just got to the end, he just went out on his own. So listening to Bootsy, the defendant's own mother, who was also convicted co-conspirator, talk to Alter A. Zanfield about Raphael Edmond and how he got started in the drug business and how he got so huge in the drug business, it's got to be devastating. It's as devastating, it's more devastating than having his mother cooperating as a government witness on the stand.

testifying against him. Bray was real fucked up with them locking his mother, you know what I mean, out of anybody. Because actually, she had shit to do with nothing that we done. You know what I mean? It was just his mom.

And the feds, I guess they feel, we snatch her ass up and throw her in on this conspiracy that'll make him give us something. You know what I mean? But Bray mom the whole time, son, stay on your ground.

We're going to beat this case and end the story. The jury found Edmund guilty of a massive drug conspiracy and sentenced him to life without parole. I always knew throughout the whole trial that we was going to get found guilty. The FBI got a tip from an informant that Raefel was setting up deals from the prison at Lewisburg. He couldn't have been there for but two months before we started hearing.

Everybody was moving nowhere. Everybody was selling wine. Colombians are teaming up with Mexicans.

They know the raw stuff is coming in in record amounts. And they're flooding the border region with cocaine. They're getting shit sent down through the Y. Coming through the ceiling, you know what I'm saying? He made friends with a Colombian who was a serious, serious dealer.

Everybody was giving money to Lewisburg. He wasn't the only one. Even the people that we've arrested ten years ago and went away for a heavy time, five, six, eight years, they're back and they're selling again. The clever Edmund had simply moved his office to the penitentiary. Lewisburg became an office to work at, to deal with.

The Colombian reached out to his contacts and Raefel to his and they put the two together and they orchestrated major drug deals from inside Lewisburg. Imagine our frustration. We had spent all this effort and law enforcement and all this taxpayer's money to identify his organization and him, prosecute him, get him all locked up. They got huge sentences under federal sentencing guidance. And here he is in prison, becoming a larger drug dealer than he had when he was in the street.

He's doing the same thing for prison? What is this? And we kept thinking back to something we saw a few weeks ago, earlier this month, when Edmund was taken out of the courtroom to jail for the last time. He walked confidently toward the police helicopter, turned and mouthed these words, look closely, Rafe Edmund said, I'll be back. It is now more than an embarrassment.

Guess who his cellmate was? His cellmate at USP Lewisburg was the third largest cocaine dealer in the world. Chicky Osvaldo Trujillo Blanco. One of the sons of Griselda Blanco, who was one of the original founders of the company.

He's sitting on top of a family empire in Colombia manufacturing coke. Rafel knew when he was back on the street. He made all these connections of drug dealers.

And now he had a customer base. What does it say about the ability to wage a war on drugs? When you put away a kingpin and there are just as many drugs on the street.

There was a lot of guys in DC that were still being supplied by Rafel. We hadn't locked all them up. So the connection between Rafel and Chickie. was a natural business one, which we couldn't have foreseen in a million years that that would happen in prison. Communication between the capitals of Colombia, one of the drug-producing centers of the world, and the United States, one of the drug-consuming centers of the world, exists on two levels.

Chicky would make a phone call to his family in Colombia and order up kilos. To be shipped directly to people that Ray Feldman designated. Ray Feldman then became a big power broker. The phone was a thing that's a major commodity.

Ray would get dudes that maybe, by himself or the commissary, to come out at the count and sign up on the phone list. If we get 15 minute spots, he might block off an hour and a half, so he'd go talk on the phone. Ray's longest session on the phone was two hours and fifty-some minutes. three hours non-stop. Ready to pick your phone up and get a call.

Get your half a million, 200,000. I've seen him do it. And he talked to over 50 people in three hours around the country and outside the country.

So it was pretty phenomenal. One corrections department official said that some of the inmates and staffers here are treating Rafe Letman like a godfather. I don't like that, I'd rather be just an ordinary prisoner. I don't wanna be looked at like I'm different than any other human being that's in jail.

I'm just like them, I'm in jail right now. We go eat lunch and I go on to, we go to Lewisburg, a chat hall. So I see the big dudes through there and I'm like, man, anybody from DC working on the line? He was like, yeah. He said, yeah, how are you from DC?

So I said, yeah. Can you tell Ray is cold in the night and Troy, he comes to the window, what's up, you all right down there? I'm like, dude, that's Rayford, that's Rayford.

So I'm like, that's the dude Ray down there. So I'm like, damn, I come from being a nobody to a motherfucker mace. They like, Shawty, you need to see. Hey, look, I wasn't even watching TV at the time.

That's how big the door. I'm laid back in the cup, me and the old head is going my way. I'm up front like this now. Officials are apparently getting concerned about what kind of power Raefel Edmond might be wielding from jail. Osvaldo Trujillo Blanco, who had been incarcerated in Lewisburg, had finished his time and had returned to Columbia.

He will remain hidden now and will continue to run his vast cocaine empire in Columbia's outlying region. Because of his connection with Chicky, Rafel controlled something like 40% of the cocaine traffic in the Indies. DC at the time.

Rayful could have 20, 30, 40 kilos at a time shipped to a friend of his choice to DC. And huge, that was huge power. There were several occasions when the individuals who Ray connected to chicken to receive drugs, Lost the drugs, or simply just didn't pay for them. You know, I'm inside, but he goes, 30 joints.

I need this. And they not paying you nothing. They saying, fuck you.

If Ray bring in a thousand keys, 50 of them keys, right, people won't even pay him for them. You see what I'm saying? People won't even pay him the money.

It was... several million dollars owed to Chickie because of drugs. And I remember listening to the phone calls, and Chickie is absolutely irate against them, complaining to Ray about them. That's why I say he was a businessman, because the average person, they wouldn't, man, if you took one key or if you took five keys, man, that was enough to get your head hit.

But he did not in any way hold Ray responsible in any of the problems that occurred. And problems occurred routinely. Edmund's drug activities, while incarcerated, surpassed in volume and in scope the drug distribution network that he developed and ran prior to his imprisonment.

The government are the good guys, and they don't want to be perceived as contributing to the problem. They want to contribute to the solution. and by allowing drugs to be used.

to reach the street, they are becoming part of the problem. The besieged governments of the drug-producing countries are fighting back, fighting to break the international drug rings. Two years after Colombia and the United States joined forces to crush the cocaine cartels, Medellin, home of Colombia's most violent cocaine cartel, is being called the murder capital of the world. If Americans use cocaine or smoke marijuana or kill somebody in Colombia then Americans are paying for murder. After people who end up in the morgue are murdered.

The kingpins who have been driving this drug trafficking are being treated with kid gloves by the Colombian government. Chicky was killed, assassinated basically, as a result of an argument over money or drugs or both that someone had with Oswaldo's mother. He had called in. He began to talk about, you know, where he was.

Ray was pretty devastated by the news on the phone. And not just because he lost his connection, because clearly they were close friends and that affected him. He took it upon himself, man, to try to get out of it, but he couldn't. Because it was like he was in too deep. There were a number of problems with his people in the street who didn't...

pay for the drugs that he received from Chickie. That put his back against the wall, you know? That put him in there, you know, he got to deal with the little situation. So it was like, man, you know, they left me for dead, you know what I'm saying? So with Chickie gone, other people in Columbia wanted to collect that money.

And they weren't as lenient with Ray as far as him being responsible for his people not paying the bill. So there was some dissatisfaction. It's like a rat trapped in a corner. You know, his only way out is death or, you know, one way or another.

Ray would send out a message to him, you guys don't pay me, you're coming here with me. When they finally got wind of the prison-based operation involving Colombian drug suppliers, they eavesdropped on Edmund's phone calls. When confronted, Edmund confessed. And helped authorities set up his alleged associates.

I remember the day when Ray got taken off the compound to go work with the government. When I just came back in from the weight power working out. And I came upstairs to fuck with him, do my usual. We talked for about 30, 40 minutes about some bullshit, what's going on. And then when I went downstairs to take a shower, take a nap, no, take a shower, read a book for about 30 minutes.

Went back upstairs to fuck with him. It was about 3.15, I didn't see him. We asked the Bureau of Prisons to...

Take him out of the prison, I believe they did it on a ruse of some kind. And we had him brought to a hotel too far from the prison. What the fuck is going on?

There was no food in the microwave cooking. I didn't see him sitting with his ass eating. So I went to his room to look for him.

I didn't see him. Then a whole bunch of people kept coming to me and said, Yo, where Ray at? Where Ray at, B.A.? These are very sharp guys.

They know that once Ray Fuller is gone, he can't come back. Everybody's going to be in his business. What happened?

What did you do? What did you say while you were gone? We just simply started to discuss with Ray and present Ray with the evidence we had against him.

How long we'd been investigating him. They played the tapes for him. was his voice saying of drug deals. Did you get any money already? Did you get any money?

We had the undercover officer there that you could meet and see who he'd actually been for drugs with. He knew. I mean, as they say on the street, he knew what time it was.

He knew there was no beating that, and he was down for a life sentence. Anyway, what could he do? I'm already locked up for the rest of my life.

They say I'm not coming home. Okay, I'm going to say what I need to say and get my mother to come home. I mean, there are people you know probably would do the same thing.

Somewhere down the line, you get tired. You look and reality sets that this ain't the way I want to be. It was a very emotional time.

You know, he was very sorrowful again. He said he was sorry. You know, discipline.

Ray teared up a lot. That got to him. Everybody is human, no matter what type of tough exterior.

They try to represent, you know, people as human. You're not robots. Regardless of how tough you try to be on the street, how tough you try to be in prison. If Ray wanted to be a rat, when his mother got him, when his mother, the woman he loved more than life, Constance Bootsy Purr, the woman he loved more than life itself, if he wanted to be a rat, he'd have ratted them to get his mother and his sister.

He loved his sister's deal. He would have never wanted to see his mother and his sister in concert in his honor. So something forced him to do what he's done, to do what he did.

Because why would he spend 18 years in some of the most dangerous prisons in the world? Just because he liked it? No. Because of the honor and the code he was living under. But something forced him to, after 17, 18 years, to wake up and say, Okay, I'm going to tell you.

No. We were very surprised that Raefel was hoping this. I have no problem using snitches. You have to prove the cases under our system of laws. He told us that he'd been thinking about this.

He'd already made a decision that when they stepped to him, he was going to cooperate. He, at one point, said, what do you want me to do? When he made up his mind to do something and he signed the plea agreement and he gave his word, he did it. And when he did that, he knew that he then had to place his survivability in the hands of law enforcement. We arranged for him to call us elected.

A cover apartment, and then instead of his friends and family three waiting phone calls, we were three waiting the phone call for him. You beep your source, he gets back to you on the number, you make your arrangements, and it's normally by public telephones, which make interception by electronic surveillance. And that's how we sounded out, they would call me and I would call back. No one thought that they would ever go to jail. No one ever thought that they would go to jail.

Not even me. The way he got them dudes, come on man. I say this even when I was in before I came a thousand times.

Why? How can you be mad with him? Yeah, you say you mad. How can you be mad because you sit there thinking like this?

How you gonna sit here and owe a dude at this day and time, 30,000, and let him call me back up and say, don't worry about that. Come on and come and see me. We arranged meetings with, I believe, eight different, six or eight different individuals. who wanted a connection for drugs from Ray. Okay, Ernie, we're all set.

In Columbia, South America, a drug trafficker cut a deal to smuggle nearly 700 pounds of cocaine to Miami. I believe there were eight different separate deals all taken down in one day. He didn't know the men he had hired to transport the drugs were undercover U.S. customs agents who seized the shipment. It's one of the most successful and one of the most feared drug kinpings in Colombia has given himself up. I've been doing this for 25 years and that's the largest seizure of drugs I've ever seen in my life and it gave me really cold chills when I walked in and looked at it and the magnitude of it has really not sunk into me yet.

As many of you may know, Jose Ali Lopez Chacon of Bogota, Colombia, boarded a plane bound to Miami this morning at 11 o'clock Eastern Time. Upon deplaning in Miami, he was arrested. Sources say the agents believe the trafficker was a close associate of Pablo Escobar, leader of Colombia's notorious Medellin cocaine cartel.

The capture of these three key individuals, who are top leaders of Colombian cocaine trafficking and money laundering cartels in our belief. And whom we believe include the operators of two massive drug rings in the United States. The Colombian dudes that Ray was fucking with, as well as some of their associates, was fucked up when they found out Ray was in forment. Then Leslie Klain, they might have had a hit on Ray.

You don't double-cross a Colombian. No, never. Mr. Edmund is in involuntary protective custody because there have been some threats.

Well, right now, it's kind of sad. Because when I'm in jail most of the time I'm separated from everybody. You know, I don't want to be locked down. He's chosen his path, which essentially puts his life and future in your hands. Because if you want to use them, as an informant, you need to protect them and keep them alive.

Rayfield's going to have his family the rest of his life and he's going to have his protection program. Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and say, I'm 25 years old, and they tell me I'm going to have to spend the rest of my life here? Nah, I don't ever wake up and say that because I don't believe it.

I don't believe that I'm going to spend the rest of my life in jail because I don't think that was meant for me to spend the rest of my life in jail. So I just don't look at it like that. I honestly don't believe it. I never even thought about it as far as just knowing I'm going to be there even 10 or 15 years.

I just know something is going to happen good and I'm going to eventually get out. Do it all, everything, all you don't need, anything, or else If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world? I don't quite know what to say. I feel those three words are said to my

Transcript for:Black Star: Urban Culture and Its Impact

Transcript for:
Black Star: Urban Culture and Its Impact