Yes, the & does mean run in background.
I want that there because I don't want to wait for the command to finish. I want to execute it and continue immediately regardless of how long the command will take.
P.S. Don't let the 'ps' command in the example cloud the issue. The command I send is not important. What is important is that I am able to execute a command and get a response back to the user that it was started, not that it finished. I was hoping to use the list form of system to get rid of any 'shell' issues with quoting or any other special chars. Maybe & is a special shell char?