60 Minutes - Sunday, June 9, 2019

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

At 70 years old, actor Samuel L. Jackson has no plans on slowing down, as he tells Steve Kroft. From smartphones to cars and defense missiles, modern U.S. life depends on rare earth elements. As Lesley Stahl reports, China dominates the industry. And -- Jon Wertheim introduces us to the couple who won millions of dollars, by cracking the code on lottery games. Those stories on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. The F-35 fighter jet is the most technologically advanced weapon system in history. Each one contains nearly a half a ton of what's called rare earth elements, almost all of which come from China. The guidance systems on weapon systems and Tomahawk cruise missile, any of the smart bombs have rare earths in them. I'd be hard-pressed to name anything that we consider worth building... Today.

Today and going forward that would not have a rare earth component in it. Because of this, because of the monopoly on rare earths, does China threaten our national security? Unchecked, yes. For years, high school sweethearts Jerry and Marge Selby lived a quiet life in Everett, Michigan, a single stoplight factory town that collapses in the folds of the map, which is why investigators took note when Jerry and Marge made $26 million winning various state lottery games dozens of times. You went into this looking for organized crime. Were you surprised by what you found? I wasn't surprised. I was dumbfoundedly amazed that these math nerd geniuses had found a way, legally,

to win a state lottery and make millions from it. As you might suspect, Samuel L. Jackson is a real character, and not just in his movies. I got my eye on you. What's it like being married to Sam Jackson? Oh, God, oh, God. Do you watch your movies? Yes, I do.

You like seeing yourself on screen? I do. I used to, you know, when I was doing theater in New York, I always wanted to see the play I was in with me in it. Hard to do. Yeah, it is, very difficult. I always think that, oh, I can't stand to watch myself, it's like some bulls**t.

It's like, really? So watch me business. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Bill Whitaker.

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insurers in the industry and has been named one of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you, that's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you the freedom to do what you love, or visit www.pacificlife.com. Nearly five years ago, we reported a story on something called rare earth elements. Now they've become a major element of the U.S.-China trade war. Rare earths are unusual metals that can be found in almost every piece of high-tech you can think of, from new cars to precision-guided missiles to the screen you're watching this story on right now.

China controls roughly 80 percent of the mining, refining, and processing of rare earths. Now, in response to President Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods, Beijing is making not-so-subtle threats to cut off our supply of rare earths. And that's especially troubling, because as we reported in 2015, it was the United States that started the rare earth revolution in the first place. It all began here, at this mine in Mountain Pass, California, an hour west of Las Vegas, when geologists first identified rare earth elements deep in the Mojave Desert. They were considered geological oddities until the 60s, when it was discovered that one of these elements, europium,

enhanced the color red in TV sets. And soon, the rare earth industry was born. CBS presents this program in color. Rare earth chemistry is fascinating. There's so many more things that we could be doing with rare earths. Constantine Karianopoulos, then chairman of Mali Corps, which owned and operated the Mountain Pass mine for six decades, took us to the heart of the operation. Is this considered a big mine?

In terms of rare earth standards, yes. It's one of the heart of the operation. Is this considered a big mine? In terms of rare earth standards, yes. It's one of the biggest in the world. Are we actually walking on rare earth elements right now? We're physically on the ore body. We are right on it. It starts at the top of the mine, then comes down, and we're walking on it,

and it goes in that direction. So what are rare earth elements? If you ever took high school chemistry, you learn that they're clumped together at the end of the periodic table, atomic numbers 57 through 71. And they have difficult to pronounce Greek or Scandinavian names. Lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, praesiodymium, samarium, terbium. Some of them are phosphorescent.

Erbium amplifies light and is used in fiber optic cables. Gadolinium has magnetic properties and is used in MRI machines and x-rays. As for neodymium, you may be carrying some of it in your pocket. Next time your phone vibrates, think of us, because the vibration motor is a small motor that contains a tiny neodymium magnet. Karyanopoulos showed us around a new model home to illustrate that rare earths are making our appliances energy efficient, like state-of-the-art refrigerators, touchscreen thermostats, energy efficient light bulbs, the air conditioning systems. They're also in our cars in the form of catalytic converters, sensors, and hybrid car batteries.

Hybrids in particular use a lot more because they contain electric motors that would not function without rare earths. A Prius has roughly 25 pounds of rare earths and they're hidden in plain sight in our everyday lives, in our computers and gadgets. Even the lights and cameras we use to film this story are chock full of rare earths. What I'm getting from you is that modern life depends on these elements. Absolutely. Despite their name, rare earths are not rare. Small amounts can be found in your backyard. They're trapped in what looks like ordinary rock, but there are only a few places on earth with concentrations high enough to mine. Rare earths normally are found in very, very low concentrations. This is probably running

something in the 25 percent grade, which is remarkable. To anyone who has ever worked with rare earths, this is a thing of beauty. But getting the rare earths out of that rock is nasty business, requiring toxic acids and lots of water. In fact, the mine was shut down by the state of California in 1998 after radioactive water seeped into the surrounding Mojave Desert from an underground pipe. The mine lay dormant for a decade, giving China an opportunity. The Chinese made a very conscious decision to enter that industry. Dan McGrory was special assistant to President George Herbert Walker Bush

and has advised the U.S. government on critical materials. When the Malikor mine closed, he says China was already well on its way to becoming the king of rare earths. There's a point at which the lines cross. The United States production declines, Chinese production is ramping up. Those lines cross somewhere around 1986. So how did they pull it off? What were the factors that allowed them to basically take this away from us? Well, the advantage of lower labor costs would be a place to start. Also, environmentally, very, almost no environmental constraints around mining, safety considerations for the miners

doing the mining, in huge contrast to the United States. So that translates directly into lower pricing. Yeah. And lower pricing can push other people out of the market. And that's basically what happened. It's basically what happened. The Chinese also had orders from the top. In a little-noticed speech in 1992, Deng Xiaoping signaled China's intention to corner the market. What exactly did he say? The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths. He actually said that, Deng Xiaoping?

Actually said that, yeah. I think it's fair to say at that point people in the rest of the world would have been saying, what is he talking about? Just went right over our heads. I think so. Did we just not foresee what they foresaw? It's extraordinary if they actually foresaw all the uses. Our designers and developers advanced the miniaturized applications for laptops and cell phones while the Chinese were going after the metals and materials out of which these things are actually built. How did they get the know-how?

An enormous amount of investment. It's kind of like the Chinese moonshot, the moon program. China poured billions into the industry, ignoring the consequences. We obtained this video from a freelance cameraman showing the area near Baotou, China's rare earth capital, where the air, land and water are so saturated with chemical toxins, the Chinese have had to relocate entire villages. This is one of the few places where rare earths are turned into metals,

which are then alloyed or blended into things like permanent magnets. These are magnets that once you magnetize them, they stay that way. Ed Richardson, president of the U.S. Magnetic Materials Association, says the most important use of rare earths is in magnets. Only a small amount can produce magnets able to lift a thousand times their weight. This is a cell phone. He showed us how miniaturized rare earth magnets can be. So I'm going to take it thousand times their weight. This is a cell phone. He showed us how miniaturized rare earth magnets can be. So I'm going to take it apart layer by layer and we're going to get to the point where we can actually see the magnets, the rare earth magnets that are inside them.

Oh, let me see this. It's magnetic. There's three little magnets in there. Oh, one, two, three. Right. And if you put the paper clip on there, you can see how it sticks. And this little tiny thing is the speaker. Right. This is how devices have gotten small, very powerful. Because the magnets are so powerful, you don't have to use much of it. The U.S. developed this technology, but China bought most of it right out from under us. For instance, in 1995, China bought the biggest American rare earth magnet company, MagnaQuench, which was based in Indiana.

When they bought the factory, they now had the patents, they now had the equipment, and they actually had some of the MagnaQuench employees in the United States go to China and teach the people how to make the products. Did we not understand the strategic importance of keeping that industry here? We didn't get it. And unfortunately, the technology was transferred to China. Before that, technology was appreciated. And now we're seeing so many, for instance, defense systems that are dependent on it. Does that make us dependent on China for our defense systems?

We are very dependent on China. We are dependent on China for our weaponry. Right. A prime example of that is the new F-35 fighter jet, the most technologically advanced weapon system in history. Each one contains nearly half a ton of rare earths. Former White House official Dan McGrory says that's just for starters. The guidance systems on weapons systems and Tomahawk cruise missile, any of the smart bombs have rare earths in them, lasers. I'd be hard-pressed to name anything that we consider worth building

today and going forward that would not have a rare earth component in it. Because of this, because of the monopoly on rare earths, does China threaten our national security? Unchecked, yes. What finally woke up the U.S. government was an incident at sea in 2010. A Chinese fishing trawler rammed a Japanese Coast Guard ship in a territorial dispute. Ah! The Japanese seized the boat's captain, and two weeks later, China stopped shipping rare earths to Japan. The Chinese cut them off, and for 30 to 40 days, the rare earths did not float to Japan. So it was

a real shot across the bow to the Japanese that this is something that you have to be worried with. It was a wake-up call. Finally, 20 years after Deng Xiaoping's speech, rare earths were on the U.S. radar screen. This case involves something called rare earth materials. President Obama lodged a formal complaint to the World Trade Organization against China for creating shortages for foreign buyers, and in 2014, the WTO ruled against Beijing. No one in the Obama administration would talk to us back then about rare earths and our dependence on China, including the Department of Energy, the Pentagon,

or the U.S. Trade Representative. Even the private sector didn't want to discuss the problem. We tried to get interviews with heads of companies that use the magnets and other products coming out of China, and they would not talk to us. Is there fear in high-tech companies that if they say something negative, maybe China won't sell them what they need? I think that there is grave concern in these companies, but perhaps not a willingness to talk about that on the street corner. So what is the U.S. doing to restore the industry here? Out in California, MOLLE Corp. was allowed to reopen after it developed new technology that protects the environment. The Pentagon has begun stockpiling rare earths, an industry is researching new technologies that would replace them.

Do you get any help from the U.S. government? They want to have a rare earth industry here. Encouragement, yeah. Encouragement. That's it. Yeah. The government is not offering incentives like tax breaks or subsidies

that would lure businesses into the market. What needs to change to bring more of the industry back to the United States? Well, first of all, we need to take a long-term view. It took 20 years to lose the dominant position, at least 20 years, and it's probably going to take us 10, 15 years, if we execute, for some of these supply chains to start coming back. Less than a year after our initial report, Mollicor, the owner of the U.S. Mountain Pass mine, went bankrupt and shut the plant down. New owners, MP Materials, are redesigning the facility

and hope to get the U.S. back in the rare earth business to challenge China's near global monopoly sometime next year. Last year, Americans spent more than $80 billion playing state lotteries. That's around $250 for each citizen, more than what was spent on concerts, sporting events, and movie tickets combined. Over 25 states took in more from their lottery proceeds than from corporate income tax. Because of these stakes, it's essential that in both perception and reality, lotteries are truly games of chance, everyone entering with an equal opportunity to win. Which is why investigators took note when a retired couple from Michigan, Jerry and Marge Selby,

made $26 million winning various state lottery games dozens of times. This is not a story, though, of a con or a scam or an inside job. No, as we first told you in January, this is a ballot of a couple from small-town America who did something that most people only dream of. They didn't so much as beat the lottery odds as they figured them out. For years, high school sweethearts Jerry and Marge Selby lived a quiet life in Everett, Michigan, population 1,900. A single stoplight factory town that collapses in the folds of a map. Together they raised six kids and ran a local convenience store on Main Street. Jerry handled the liquor and cigarettes and Marge kept the books and made the sandwiches. How long did you have the

store? 17 years. Why did you decide to sell it? I was 62, Marge was 63. And I thought it was a nice time to sell and see what we could do after that. You're in your early 60s. You decide to retire. You're going to put your feet up. What was the plan? Yeah, that was basically it. I don't think we had one per se. That was basically it.

We were going to enjoy life a little bit. But one morning in 2003, Jerry happened to walk back into the corner store and spotted a brochure for a brand new lottery game called Windfall. Jerry always possessed what he calls a head for math. He has a bachelor's degree in the subject from nearby Western Michigan University. And in only a matter of minutes, he realized that this was a unique game. I read it, and by the time I was out here, I knew what the potential might be. It did not take you weeks to suss this out. No, no, not at all. Three minutes.

Three minutes, and you've found the loophole in the state lottery. Three minutes. I found a special feature. That feature was called a roll-down, and the lottery announced when it was coming. Unlike the Mega Millions games you've probably heard of, where the jackpot keeps building until someone hits all six numbers and wins the big prize, in Windfall, if the jackpot reached five million dollars and no one matched all six numbers, all the money rolled down to the lower-tier prize winners, dramatically boosting the payouts down to the lower tier prize winners, dramatically boosting the payouts of those who matched five, four, or three numbers.

Sound complicated? Well, it wasn't to Jerry. See if you can stick with him here. Here's what I said. I said, if I played $1,100, mathematically, I'd have one four-number winner. That's a thousand bucks. I divided $1,100 by six instead of $57 because I did a mental quick dirty and I come up with $18. So I knew I'd have either $18 or $19 three number winners and that's $50 each. At $18, I got $1,000 for a four number winner and I got $18 three number winners worth $50 each. That's $900. So I got $1,000 for a four-number winner, and I got 18 three-number winners worth $50 each. That's $900. So I got $1,100 invested, and I've got a $1,900 return. Sounds like good math.

Yeah, a little over 80%, isn't it? You're talking about this as if it's the most obvious set of figures in the world. This is not taxing the outer limits of your math skills. No, no, it is. Actually, it's just basic arithmetic. Are you thinking, I bet there are a million people that have also caught on to this? Exactly is what I thought. When a roll-down was announced, Jerry sprang into action.

He bought $3,600 in windfall tickets and won $6,300. Then he bet $8,000 and nearly doubled it. At that point, I told Marge what I was doing. I was going to say, putting thousands of dollars in action on a state lottery game, at what point do you share this with your wife? Right at that point. Jerry says, I think I've cracked the Michigan state lottery. What do you say to that?

You know, it didn't surprise me. You weren't surprised? No, I wasn't surprised because as long as nobody wins and you win money, you could see the numbers. So when you realize there aren't a million people that have discovered this, it's pretty much just you. What's that feeling like? Amazed. Yeah. Amazed.

Pretty happy. I just couldn't fathom it. Soon, Jerry and Marge Selby started playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Jerry set up a corporation, GS Investment Strategies. He showed us stacks of record books that detailed their winnings. Here's one that was pretty successful. We played $515,000, and we got back $853,000. That's about a 60% return.

That was a good return. They invited family and friends to share in their, well, windfall, selling shares in the corporation for $500 apiece. You might say this was a different kind of hedge fund. We met some of the local investors at the Everett hangout spot, Sugar Ray's Cafe. All four of you guys are members of an exclusive club. Yeah. James White is a local attorney. Dave Huff operated a machine and tool shop. And brothers Lauren and Ray Gerber are retired farmers. And when you looked at the mathematics of it, it made sense.

Do you guys remember how much you gave him to invest? Well, I had about $8,000, and then I put another $6,000 in for the grandkids. For the grandkids? Yeah. But overall, you guys came out way ahead on this. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. It was a good game.

It helped me put three kids through school, one through law school, so it was quite beneficial. Used it for education? Pretty much. There's a lot of people around town that knew what it was about and talk about it, that it occurred. But a lot of people were really leery. They were thinking, you guys are nuts. By the spring of 2005, Jerry's club stood at 25 members. Those willing to press their luck included three state troopers, a factory plant manager, and a bank vice president. They had played windfall 12 times, winning millions, when Michigan suddenly shut down the game, citing, ironically, lack of sales.

Michigan game gets closed down. How long before you realized there was a game in Massachusetts that also presented some favorable odds? One of our players emailed me and he said, Massachusetts has a game called Cash Windfall. Do you think we could play that? I've heard that. And so I got on the computer, I looked at the game, and once I researched it, I got back with him, and I said, we can play that game. We got another winner. How long did it take you this time to figure out that you could get a positive return here?

Ten minutes. That's when Jerry and Marge Selby developed a routine they continued for the next six years, driving 900 miles to Massachusetts every time there was a roll down and buying hundreds of thousands of tickets at two local convenience stores. Then they hold up, not in some fancy suite at the High Rollers Hotel, but in a room at the Red Roof Inn, sorting the tickets by hand for 10 hours a day, 10 days straight. Not so much playing the lottery as working it. So once there was a roll down, on average, how much were you putting in play? Over $600,000 per play, seven plays a year.

$4.2 million once this roll down was coming. Per year. Do you ever get nervous? Oh, yeah. What did you do with all the losing tickets? Saved them. You saved all the losing tickets? Saved them and big, you know, the big totes.

Big plastic totes. There must have been millions. 18. $18 million worth of losing tickets. Losing. And you have this. Just in case we had a physical federal audit. We had the upstairs of the barn.

I stored them in one end and in the other end. And then I thought, oh, no, this floor is going to fall through. So then we stored them down in a pole barn. And we had probably 60, 65 tubs of tickets. Did you guys ever say, we're supposed to be retired here? We're making 14-hour drives to Massachusetts. We're having fun. It's fun. It's fun for you guys. It's fun doing it. You get a high on it. And it gave you a satisfaction of being successful at something that was worthwhile to not only us personally, but to our friends and our family. But in 2011, the Boston Globe got a tip and discovered that in certain Massachusetts locations,

cash windfall tickets were being sold at an extraordinary volume. Smart people had figured out, if I buy enough of these tickets, I'll always be a winner. I'll get back more than I spent. Scott Allen oversees the Globe's investigative reporters, known as the Spotlight Team. The paper's reporting revealed that two groups were dominating cash windfall. The Selby gang from Everett, Michigan, and their competition. A syndicate led by math majors from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These were kids young enough to be the Selby's grandchildren.

The guy who started it, he was doing an independent study project as an undergraduate at MIT, and he figured out that he could win this game, so he got a bunch of his friends to pool in their money. So they became, as time went on, professional cash windfall players, recruiting their friends and raising money from backers until they, too, were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. Incredibly, the MIT group bet between $17 and $18 million on cash windfall over a seven-year period, earning at least $3.5 million in profits, almost the exact same rate of return as the Selbys.

You've got a syndicate from northwest Michigan. You've got a group of MIT students. Did your story meter start beeping? It was a great story. The Boston Globe article caused a sensation, raising suspicion that the game was rigged. The Massachusetts state treasurer shut down the cash windfall game and called for an investigation.

It was led by then State Inspector General Greg Sullivan. When we got involved, the public perception was there must be some kind of organized crime or public corruption to explain how millions of dollars are being bet by syndicates on state lottery tickets. We really looked at this looking for corruption. We used subpoenas. We looked at documents. We interviewed dozens of people to look at this in detail with a hypothesis that something illegal had happened. You went into this looking for organized crime.

As the story unfolded, were you surprised by what you found? I wasn't surprised. I was dumbfoundedly amazed that these math nerd geniuses had found a way, legally, to win a state lottery and make millions from it. And the state's getting rich in the process. And the state got very rich. The state made $120 million. The investigation found no one's odds of winning was affected by high-volume betting. When the jackpot hit the roll-down threshold, cash windfall became a good bet for everyone, not just the big-time bettors like the Selbys. By then, though, Massachusetts state lottery had moved on to a different game, without a statistical twist.

And with that, Jerry and Marge Selby's excellent adventure drew to an end. In total, their unlikely homegrown company grossed more than $26 million from nine years of playing the lottery. Your corporation, $26 million. Mm-hmm. You smile when you recounted that figure. That was satisfactory. Satisfactory. They made nearly $8 million in profit before taxes. Back in Everett, not exactly the land of extravagance, the Selbys put their winnings to practical use, renovating their home and helping

their six kids, 14 grandkids, and 10 great-grandchildren pay for their education. They still get together with members of their lottery group, but millions of dollars in windfall tickets have been replaced by nickel-and-dime poker night. And Marge makes everyone chicken pot pie. I'm struck by how measured you are telling this story. Do you find anything remarkable about this? The only thing I found really remarkable is nobody else really seemed to grasp it. What I'm hearing you say is that this part of the country is really good at keeping a secret. If you feel like you're seeing a lot of Samuel L. Jackson lately, it's not your imagination.

He seems to be everywhere. He's starring in six movies this year, including Shaft, which opens this week, and later this summer in Spider-Man, Far From Home. Then there are the credit card commercials and the movie trailers, not to mention a hundred or so of his films circulating on cable TV. He's been around for a long time, and as you might suspect, he is quite a character. As we said when we first aired this story in March, he's someone we thought would be fun to hang out with.

If you know him only from his films, there are things in this story that will probably surprise you. He spent 15 years on the stage in New York and didn't become a movie star until his mid-40s. He's been with the same woman, also a distinguished actor, for nearly 50 years. And the movies he's been in have grossed more money than any other actor's films in the history of Hollywood and nobody likes to watch them more than he does do you watch your movies yes I do you like seeing yourself on screen I do I used to you know when I was doing theater in New York I always wanted to see the play I was in with me in it hard to do yeah it is very difficult uh so this was perfect for me I get to watch my performances I always think that oh I can't stand to watch myself.

It's like some bulls**t. It's like, really? So watch me business. And if you can't watch it, why should people pay $13.50 to watch you do it? At age 70, when most A-list actors find it hard to get work, Samuel L. Jackson is very much in demand. I got my eye on you. actors find it hard to get work, Samuel L. Jackson is very much in demand. I got my eye on you. His two movies this year, Glass and Captain Marvel, have grossed more than a billion dollars.

You famous or something? His career has allowed him to be all sorts of different people. A bounty hunter. A computer engineer at Jurassic Park, Hold on to your butts. I ain't going nowhere! Can you give me some money? a junkie,

a Jedi master, And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and... and a Bible-quoting hitman in Pulp Fiction, all the while stealing scenes and sometimes entire movies while garnering critical acclaim. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I break your concentration? I got nominated for an Academy Award. But like I tell people, you know, winning or losing an Academy Award doesn't do a lot toward moving the comma on your check. What moves the comma on your check? Bussing seats.

Selling tickets. Right. If you're in a movie and nobody goes to see it, it's like, yeah, Academy Award winner. Yeah, I don't want to see that. You know, you go to movies because people do exciting movies or you like the characters that they do. First and foremost, Sam Jackson is a performer, an entertainer in real life and on the screen. He creates memorable characters. Strong, opinionated, sometimes scary people, often with a wicked sense of humor.

It's more than a persona or a brand. It's almost a whole genre. Raw, honest, incredible. I like to play characters that express themselves verbally. So I'm always looking to tell people who I am and not specifically just show them. And that's just a natural quality? Is that Sam Jackson? I think it is. I don't necessarily care about whether I'm liked or not. And I think I've found interesting ways of making bad guys, guys that people like.

How do you do that? You try and keep people as human as you possibly can keep them until they have to do the thing that they have to do. And that's your genre? I hope so. He grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, not far from the Walnut Street Bridge. His grandmother told him stories about black people being lynched there. We used to ride our bicycles down this hill, 3rd Street. It was the totally segregated Jim Crow South. Everywhere he went and everyone he knew

was black. His neighborhood, his schools, his teachers, and the experience still colors his life. So I grew up in this world, which is the street world. All these kids whose parents were domestics or worked in what was known as the chicken house where they killed chickens and packaged chickens and stuff like that. There were a mixture of kids who were in and out of reform school. We came from a place that was kind of well-versed in learning to live life as it came at you. He was raised by his grandparents, a janitor and a housemaid who had a strong work ethic. His mother, who held down a secure, well-paying government job in Washington, D.C., was a constant presence in his life, spending summers, holidays, and some

weekends with him, helping him navigate the world as a young black man. I understood. My mom's going, we're not getting you out of jail. If you get arrested, don't call me. I had a greater fear of the people that I lived with who provided for me than I did of being your friend and hanging out with you and doing something stupid that's going to get me in trouble. Sam Jackson was an excellent student and in 1966 went off to study biology at Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr., an historically black college in Atlanta, which was one of the headquarters of the Civil Rights Movement. Like many young people in the 1960s, he discovered his rebellious side on campus. He became heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement and protested against the Vietnam War.

Did you consider yourself to be a radical when you were here? No. I mean, you got thrown out for occupying the president's office, didn't you? Yeah. That's pretty involved. That's just one day in life, you know. Jackson returned to Morehouse two years later, having decided that biology required too much math and dramatic arts was much more fun. This is where you did your first work? Yes, this was where it all started. It was one of the first times during my college experience I was anxious to get up and be somewhere.

Still the same? Oh, totally, yeah. I mean, going to a rehearsal or going to work or being on a movie set is my favorite thing to do. But probably the most significant thing to happen to Sam Jackson in Atlanta was meeting LaTanya Richardson, a talented fellow student actor at Spelman College. She found him flamboyant, self-involved, and emotionally detached, but she may have been the first to appreciate his potential.

They have been together for 48 years, and LaTanya Richardson-Jackson is currently starring on Broadway in To Kill a Mockingbird. What's it like being married to Sam Jackson? Oh, God, oh, God. It's a ride. It's been a ride. It's fun.

It's sad. it's happy, it's creative. It's a conversation. I hope so. 48 years is a long time. Yeah, it is, mixed with a lot of amnesia. They would spend 15 years in New York as struggling stage actors, raising a daughter, Zoe, and keeping company with the small community of other struggling black actors that included Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Lawrence Fishburne, and Wesley Snipes. We would go and watch each other work. We partied together. When you weren't working, everybody had the same unemployment office, pretty much. So you see each other on Mondays at unemployment. By 1990, Jackson was an established New York actor, having played memorable characters

in three Spike Lee movies, including Do the Right Thing. I have today's forecast for you. Hot! But personally, his life was a mess. You had some drug and alcohol issues. There weren't issues till the end. What do you mean the end? You know, I wasn't managing it as well as I used to. That's when there were issues.

Before that, it was just life. You know, I drank, I smoked. I used to. That's when there were issues. Before that, it was just life. I drank, I smoked, I got high. It wasn't in the way of my life in that way, or I didn't think it was. He was going to work, taking his daughter to school, and making enough money to develop a taste for cocaine. And he went all in. Did it reach addiction stage? Yeah. Well, you know, it's hard to smoke cocaine and not get addicted. Smoking cocaine will bring you to your knees pretty quick. It ended one night on the kitchen floor. And I bought the cocaine.

I went home. I cooked it. And when I woke up, Latonya was standing over me. And I was passed out on the floor. And I never got to smoke. And the next day, I was in rehab. Did you go to rehab because you wanted to or needed to, or because Latonya told you you had to, you know,

I didn't go kicking and screaming. I was tired. You know, could you have done it without her? I credit her because she could have just taken Zoe and walked out and been done with me, which she didn't, that's a greater love than I will ever know. Because I don't know that I would have done that. Do you think that Tanya saved your life? Yeah. No doubt. You don't seem emotionally detached now. Am I crying?

No. Oh, okay, good. He said you saved his life. No, I didn't. He saved his life. He and God saved his life. I have no saving healing power. I was just there. In any event, it changed Jackson's life and his career. While he was in rehab, he got a call from Spike Lee offering him the role of drug addict Gator Purify in Jungle Fever. So I'm in rehab and, you know, the call comes and told me, Jungle Fever, crackhead. And I was like, okay, good.

I'm doing the research. I'm right here. So I'm ready to do it. And that was it. And that's what opened the door. That's what got me into Hollywood. Yo, baby. The role won Jackson a special award at the Cannes Film Festival for Best Supporting Actor.

And Gator became this cathartic kind of thing for me. It was basically killing off who I was, who I had been, that allowed me to free myself to go and do these other things. Those other things take up ten pages on the movie site IMDb. A half a dozen films with Quentin Tarantino, The Avengers, three Star Wars films, and scores of lesser features

in which he was better than the material. Besides scary eyes, he has a facility for language, especially profanity. No, Yolanda, Yolanda, he ain't gonna do a goddamn motherfucking thing. Obscenities roll off his tongue like Shakespeare from Olivier, even if you bleep the words. What's your favorite line? I like to say what again. Line.

Or do they speak English and what? What country you from? What? What ain't no country I ever heard of. They speak English and what? What? English, motherfucker, do you speak it? Do you think it's the line or the way you say it? I think there's a wrong way to say everything.

And I think I've found ways to say things right that make people remember them or resonate in the correct way. Directors praise his preparation, professionalism and work ethic and almost always give him wide berth with his performance. But he's not always entirely flexible. So if a director wants you to do something you don't think would be good for you or good for the film, you won't do it? No, pretty much. They understand that when they hire you? Some people think that they can overcome it, that, you know, we can come to a compromise, you know, they'll go, look, I get what you're doing and I understand it. But can we try this other thing one one time? No, we can't.

Because if I do it one time and it's on film, when you go to the editing room, that's the thing you like. That's the first thing you're going to look at, not the logical thing that I did. So let's just not do what you want to do. So you don't have that option. His mantra has always been, what does the audience want to see? And then he tries to give it to them. That's what I was taught when I was doing theater, that when you come on stage, you want to light it up to the point that when you leave, people want to go with you.

And I hope that's who I am when I show up. I'm Steve Croft, and we'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.