4/11/2023 0 Comments Jim tillman weatherman chicago![]() I could do anything that I wanted to do.”īut looking back, Tillman, now 55, says he sees his “success” much differently. “Life in Chicago was like velvet,” Tillman said. He bought so many houses for crack-cooking purposes that he couldn’t keep track of all of them. His drug-dealing associates enlisted the help of Chicago teenagers eager to make big profits from the easy work of selling dope. The 24-year-old “Freeway Boy,” was fearless and all about business. In Chicago, Tillman says he sold 50 kilos of crack a week and collected about $9 million a month from just about every street gang. ![]() ![]() Marine Drive, “surrounded by white folks with great jobs.” When Tillman returned to Chicago - the self-proclaimed “son of a hustler” who grew up in Englewood surrounded by players, pimps and drug dealers who frequented neighborhood pool halls and his aunt’s restaurant, “Helen’s Barbecue” - quickly became a crack-selling millionaire. He played a big role in Ross’s cocaine operation but managed to escape the spotlight and prison time by conducting business in Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, New York and lesser cities in Indiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Arkansas, among other places. Marines and got a scholarship to play the sport at The Citadel - dropped out of college to sell crack. Tillman - who met Ross playing high school tennis in Los Angeles, served in the U.S. Mark Konkol says the respect Tillman commands helps him reach those affected by addiction: In the documentary by filmmaker Marc Levin (with whom I worked on the CNN docu-series "Chicagoland"), Tillman plays a supporting role in explaining Ross’s early years as a crack dealer. ghettos.Īnd now, Ross’s story is featured in two movies: the feature film “Kill The Messenger,” starring Jeremy Renner, and a soon-to-be-released documentary that’s already getting a lot of buzz, “Freeway: Crack In The System.” Ross was an important source in late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb’s controversial series, “Dark Alliance,” which alleged a link between the CIA and the flood of cocaine in L.A. The crack trade made him rich, landed him near the center of the Iran-Contra Affair and got him two life sentences, both of which were reduced. The cocaine-trafficking career of Ross is legendary. In the late 1980s, the native Chicagoan helped flood his hometown - and a handful of other big cities - with crack cocaine distributed by his best pal, Los Angeles drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross. And the fact that we didn’t made their protest more viable.ENGLEWOOD - Norman Tillman lives with regret. Can any other country allow, under close scrutiny, this dimension of freedom? But the way it turned out, even the United States of America couldn’t make the statement that it sanctioned that silent, yet powerful, demonstration. They ran under our flag and they won that way. Who can deny it? The most beautiful thing this country could have accomplished would have been to show the world that in America we can even do this. Tilmon said the athletes who raised their fists in the Black power symbol at the 1968 Olympics “were acknowledging the fact that in America we do have problems. In an opinion piece he wrote for the Chicago Tribune in 1969, Mr. He and Joan Cuyjet Tilmon were married in 1988. Tilmon never lost his love for music, playing clarinet with the Lake Forest Symphony, according to his biography. Tilmon on social media, with Art Norman calling him “agiant” and Carol Marin saying he was “a total gentleman and great colleague.” His former WMAQ broadcasting colleagues praised Mr. He appeared in a 1994 episode of the TV show “ER” and had a cameo in the 2012 Bob Zemeckis movie “Flight,” starring Denzel Washington. Later in his career, he contributed aviation analysis for TV stations including Fox affiliates in Chicago and Phoenix and WBBM-TV.
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