As we’re waiting for a server, Ross delivers a rare and brief monologue about supply and demand and the innate ability of dealers to find buyers and vice versa. It is unclear whether he’s talking about his former acumen as a coke dealer or his current ability to find weed, but that’s the blurred line he walks to maintain the irresistibly over-the-top Rick Ross, Dealer-Turned-Rapper persona. Ross gives the impression that he understands something about the underbelly of the decadent scene around us that’s invisible to the untrained eye. As if to illustrate the point, Poe Boy’s Vice President Gucci Pucci, who often accompanies Ross, gives a subtle half nod backwards over his shoulder to point out two black teenagers with dreadlocks who are sitting on a pair of deck chairs pulled up by the pool. “Now, what do you think they’re doing here?” he asks.

Rick Ross was born in Carol City—the other Miami. His father, who moved away when he was in fifth grade and passed away soon after he finished high school, was from Miami, and his mother moved there from Mississippi two years before he was born. Ross’s relationship to hip-hop began when he first heard Luke Skywalker records in elementary school, then he got a copy of Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted in junior high and immediately connected it to what was, as he puts it, “going on inside my house.”

At Carol City High he was known as a football player and a weed smoker (he first smoked with two of his sister’s friends at age 13), but he kept his rhymes to himself. “After high school that’s when I started getting serious, trynna write a whole song, a chorus, a hook,” he says. “You know, learnin what 16 bars is because before I’d write 50 bars—that’s a verse—and have three of them with no chorus and call it a song. That’s also when I really started getting in the streets more.” While throwing himself into music—learning the craft, getting beats together, booking studio time under his original name Teflon Don—Ross began hanging out in the Carol City projects known as the Matchbox. “My momma did a great job raising us, but I wanted more,” he says. “I knew at the time that I didn’t wanna be a tough guy—I didn’t wanna be nobody I wasn’t—but I wanted to make some money. Given the surroundings I was in, I didn’t have to go somewhere and take all these big risks. All I had to do was have what they wanted and stand where I was standing at anyway.”