“Snowfall” Series With A Historical Background

Short story about the crack epidemic

Thomas Piasecki
ILLUMINATION
3 min readJun 13, 2024

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film-book.com

“Snowfall” is a TV series that is relatively new because its final (sixth) season was released in April 2023. It tells the story of the widely known crack epidemic. It shows us several perspectives: the first and most important is the life of the main character Franklin Saint who is a young and brilliant dealer living in South Central, L.A. The second perspective is the life of CIA agent Teddy McDonald, whose job is to finance the civil war in Nicaragua for the Contras through cocaine trafficking.

I’ve introduced you to what the series is more or less about, and at first I thought it was pure fiction well, because how crazy do you have to be to finance a small country like Nicaragua by bringing a drug into your own country? It turns out that it has a grain of truth.

A brief history lesson

In 1979, Nicaragua experienced an armed revolution that saw the FSLN (Sandinistas) seize power in the country. It was a leftist movement with communist factions. It was previously ruled by the Somoza family, which had good relations with the US. As the states were imperial states, losing influence in Central America did not please them very much. So they remedied this by creating their own guerrilla Contras, which they financed by bringing cocaine into their own country from there. Columbian or Peruvian cocaine was transported to Nicaragua from where it was bought to the US.

Franklin Saint a “Freeway” Rick Ross

As I mentioned Franklin is the main character of the series. Just like the financing of the war against Nicaragua, I considered him to be a 100% fictional character like, for example, Walter White from “Breaking Bad.” However, I was wrong, Franklin is modeled after former drug baron “Freeway” Rick Ross. Ross lived in poverty with his mom and brother in South Central, L. A near the freeway intersection hence the nickname.

He started dealing cocaine after he befriended one of his teachers, Mr. Fisher, at a craft course. Fisher was making a living dealing cocaine, and Ross needed to make some money for himself, so he went into business with his neighborhood friend Ollie “Big Loc”, who had already served time, Ollie may be shown in the series as Leon, who is a friend of Franklin’s and also had served time.

The business was going great, so great that Fisher couldn’t keep up with deliveries, so Ross changed his dealers to Ivan Arugellase, Henry Corrales, and Oscar Danilo Blandón. The latter looked like Super Mario, and all three were Nicaraguan. Ross himself says that the character of Franklin Saints was inspired by him and that he teamed up with the series creator however Singelton (the series creator) died in 2019. and did not have time to confirm Ross’ claims.

Gary Webb

photo from wikipedia

Important to this whole affair is the journalist who exposed all the cocaine trafficking to fund the Contras. His name was Gary Webb. He revealed the fact that the government turned a firm blind eye to the cocaine business of Nicaraguans e.g. Blandón was locked up for 24 months this was a ridiculously low punishment even looking at the fact that he went to cooperate with the DEA. December 10, 2004. Gary Webb, who was investigating CIA links to the “crack cocaine epidemic” outbreak, was found dead in his home. According to the coroner’s report, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, twice. In the TV series “Snowfall,” according to fans, Webb was portrayed as the woman Irena Abe.

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