Eric Ross: From the Fields of Iowa to the Depths of Transformation

From Sunday School to Street Corner

Eric Ross grew up in Bridgerton, Missouri, with a mother who taught Sunday school. You’d think that would keep a kid on the straight path. But Eric had other ideas from early on. “I was getting spanked a lot. I was really rebellious,” he told me during our conversation. “I remember like one time when I was younger, I had like taking money out of the ties thing. Like, like terrible.”

Even as a kid in church, Eric was thinking like a criminal. He broke into a Royal Rangers locker to steal money. Looking back, he realizes he was “manipulative” and “criminal minded” from childhood. When his parents moved him to St. Charles for his senior year, Eric made a decision that would shape everything that followed. He wanted to be popular and cool like the guys he admired. So he took on their persona completely.

“I wasn’t being myself. I was being what I wanted to be,” Eric explained. The fake version worked about as well as you’d expect. He barely graduated high school, started drinking heavily, got fake IDs, and ended up hitting eleven cars trying to escape a party. That pretty much ended his popularity at that school.

The California Connect

After bouncing between construction work and three DWIs by age 22, Eric had what he calls a “turn to God.” He got sober for five and a half years, grew his hair out like a disciple, and dove deep into Bible study. But that extreme personality that got him in trouble before eventually got him in trouble again.

“My personality is very extreme,” Eric said. “So then if I’m gonna be like, if I’m gonna be a Christian, I’m gonna be a prophet.” He became judgmental, isolated himself from churches he saw as money-focused, and slowly started justifying things again. First it was marijuana. Then it was selling marijuana to avoid paying for it.

Eric had been doing construction work for a house flipper, a guy who paid him in cash that smelled like drug money. When Eric brought up cocaine, his friend from California had connections. The timing was perfect in the worst way possible. His old street friends in St. Louis were struggling. “We don’t, we’ve been selling heroin because we can’t even get cocaine anymore,” one told him. “I hate selling heroin. We got like six guys on the corner with guns because these heroin acts have come, they’ll take your life for the drugs.”

Cocaine had become “like a dinosaur” in St. Louis. Eric found himself perfectly positioned between supply and demand.

Nine Ounces to a Nightmare

When Eric’s California connection handed him nine ounces of cocaine, everything accelerated. He took it to his St. Louis contacts, they confirmed it was quality product, and he was back with $32,000 for a full kilo before he knew what hit him. “Everything happened fast,” Eric said.

The money was good. The respect felt better. Eric became “the connect” between two worlds that didn’t know each other. He heard a stripper whisper about him at a party: “oh, that’s the connect.” It fed the same need for recognition that had driven him to fake popularity in high school.

The irony wasn’t lost on him. Here he was, six years after growing his hair out like a disciple, praying over kilos of cocaine. “I even got so kind of deceived in my mind that I even kind of thought that this opportunity with these kilos of cocaine was like a gift from God to get out of debt,” he admitted. The justifications came as easy as they had when he was a kid stealing from the church.

Eric wasn’t running a street corner operation. He was still doing construction work every day. The drug dealing happened maybe once a week or every two weeks. In his mind, this was a shortcut to get back to legitimate business. A stop gap. When cartel wars in Mexico disrupted supply, Eric found himself thinking about how “my business was affected by all these people being decapitated.”

The Party Lifestyle Returns

Success brought Eric back to his old patterns. He started going out, buying everyone drinks, wanting to be seen and respected. “I wanted to be the popular. I was like, you cannot be popular in the position I was in,” he said. With unlimited access to cocaine, staying away from it became impossible.

Eric wasn’t what he’d call a drug addict. He used cocaine “so I could party more and drink more.” But when you have kilos sitting around and you’re trying to recapture that high school popularity you never really had, things spiral quickly.

The construction business that had been his cover became secondary. The Bible study that had anchored his sober years faded into memory. The criminal lifestyle he’d dabbled with in his early twenties came back with serious money behind it.

From Leavenworth to Redemption

Eric’s story took him through federal prison at Leavenworth, where we worked together on the golf course. Five inmates out of 425 got that job. We left prison grounds every day to work on a real golf course with normal people who treated us like normal guys. It was surreal.

Eric’s path from Sunday school to federal prison shows how small compromises compound over time. The kid who stole from church offerings became the man praying over cocaine shipments. The desire for acceptance and respect that drove him to fake popularity in high school eventually led him to find validation in being “the connect.”

Today Eric is back in construction, building legitimate businesses without the shortcuts. He’s remarried with kids, and he preaches a couple times a month. The extreme personality that got him in trouble now serves a different purpose. He understands both the appeal of the criminal lifestyle and its ultimate emptiness.

His story reminds you that the prisons we build in our minds often become the prisons we live in for real. But it also shows that even the most twisted path can lead back to solid ground if you’re willing to do the work.