mixing pow- dered cocaine in a saucepan with baking soda and water, and then cooking off the liquid, produced tiny rocks of smokeable cocaine. It came to be called crack for the crackling sound the baking soda made when it was burned. More affectionate nicknames would soon follow: Rock, Kryptonite, Kibbles n Bits, Scrabble, and Love. By the early 1980s, the class drug was ready for the masses. Now only two things were needed to turn crack into a phenomenon: an abundant supply of raw cocaine and a way to get the new product to a mass market. The cocaine was easy to come by, for the invention of crack coin- cided with a Colombian cocaine glut. During the late 1970s, the wholesale price of cocaine in the United States fell dramatically, even as its purity was rising. One man, a Nicaraguan émigré named Oscar Danilo Blandon, was suspected of importing far more Colombian cocaine than anyone else. Blandon did so much business with the budding crack dealers of South Central Los Angeles that he came to be known as the Johnny Appleseed of Crack. Blandon would later claim that he was selling the cocaine to raise money for the CIA- sponsored Contras back home in Nicaragua. He liked to say that the CIA was in turn watching his back in the United States, allowing him to sell cocaine with impunity. This claim would spark a belief that still seethes to this day, especially among urban blacks, that the CIA itself was the chief sponsor of the American crack trade. Verifying that claim is beyond the purview of this book. What is demonstrably true is that Oscar Danilo Blandon helped establish a link-between Colombian cocaine cartels and inner-city crack merchants-that would alter American history. By putting massive amounts of cocaine into the hands of street gangs, Blandon and oth- ers like him gave rise to a devastating crack boom. And gangs like the Black Gangster Disciple Nation were given new reason to exist.     As long as there have been cities, there have been gangs of one sort