House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking, "To readers of our 'Dark Alliance' series", "America's 'crack' plague has roots in Nicaragua war", "War on drugs has unequal impact on black Americans", "Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Inquiry Findings", "The CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking Of Alleged Plot", "Though Evidence Is Thin, Tale of C.I.A. I realise now he was thinking about suicide.". But, Ceppos wrote, the series "did not meet our standards" in four areas. [22], The lede of the first article set out the series' basic claims: "For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency." They were outraged by the series's charges.[27]. Sue remarried two years ago. Who Is Gary Webb's Wife? Managed by: Pam Wilson (may be slow to respond) Last Updated: It found that CIA officials ignored information about possible Contra drug dealing; that they continued to work with Contra supporters despite allegations that they were trafficking drugs, and further asserted that officials from the CIA instructed Drug Enforcement Agency officers to refrain from investigating alleged dealers connected with the Contras. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department began its own investigation into the "Dark Alliance" claims.[30]. Should these editors subsequently deem the story to have been fatally flawed, they take the consequences. Webb's ex wife, Susan Bell told reporters that she believed Webb had died by suicide. Webb's experience came as no surprise to Jack Blum, senior prosecutor for the Kerry Committee. A passing motorist - a heavily tattooed young man - gave him a lift home, then returned and stole the motorcycle, which police recovered from him three days after Webb's death. According to Bell, Webb had been unhappy for some time . A man who was wrongfully arrested and sent to prison on remand has been awarded 100,000 in compensation from Police Scotland. By the late spring of 1996, Webb was ready to publish. Notably, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times ran articles calling his allegations unfounded. He really did believe that," she says. She kept crying about how terrible it all was - by which I mean that she was, physically, crying. We had been here before." The whole business, I suggested to Blum, has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot. So, this is not something you really make a career out of, nor would you want to. "Exactly," replied Kornbluh, who - referring specifically to the LA Times, said he is "baffled as to how they could be so gullible. "They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. She and Gary were married from 1979 to 2000 and had three children. The mainstream press, now known as the legacy. ", The significant legacy of the Webb case, "the reason this whole affair remains so significant today," Blum says, "is this: the knowledge that, if one individual dares raise such serious issues, they risk confronting a tremendous apparatus that is prepared to whack them hard, and there is very little they can expect by way of support. "[76] Scott Herhold, Webb's first editor at The Mercury-News, wrote in a 2013 column that "Gary Webb was a journalist of outsized talent. "The second bullet," adds Bell, who has worked for more than 20 years in the area of respiratory therapy, "struck his carotid artery. The Mercury News reporter came under sustained attack from the weightier US newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and, especially, the Los Angeles Times, infuriated at being scooped, on its own patch, by what it saw as a small-town paper. When Gary originally broke this mind blowing story, the arrogant authority's assumed they could simply ignore him and hope he'd go away. He was the much-loved father of Lindsay (Stephen . When Attorney General Janet Reno determined that a delay was no longer necessary, the report was released unaltered. When it did, beginning with The Washington Post, it shocked Webb's critics as much as his many admirers. . He was born in Jacksonville, Texas, on March 13, 1954, to Carroll and Waldine Webb, the younger brother of Diane Webb. I'm glad that I didn't dissuade him, because it was important to get the truth out but for Gary Webb, there was a very high price to pay." Numan's real name is Gary Anthony James Webb, and he was born on March 8, 1958. Webb, Bell explains, had written four letters explaining what he was about to do - one to her, one to each of their three children - and mailed them immediately before he killed himself. "[82], Kill the Messenger (2014) is based on Webb's book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou's biography of Webb. Gary Stephen Webb was a Pulitzer prize winning American investigative reporter who exposed cocaine trafficking by the CIA. Like the CIA and Justice Department reports, it also found that neither Blandn, Meneses, nor Ross were associated with the CIA. The second volume, "The Contra Story," was issued in a classified version on April 27, 1998, and in an unclassified version on October 8, 1998. The character reporter Irene Abe is said by fans of the show to be a stand in character for the real life Gary Webb. After his resignation from The Mercury News, Webb expanded the "Dark Alliance" series into a book that responded to the criticism of the series and described his experiences writing the story and dealing with the controversy. "He rang me up that day. We are in the living room of Bell's house just outside Sacramento, California. The reports rejected the series's main claims but were critical of some CIA and law enforcement actions. "To get back at his editors?". Walter Bogdanich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who worked with Webb on The Plain Dealer, told American Journalism Review editor Susan Paterno "He was brilliant; he knew more about public records than anybody I've ever known. [60], It found no information to support the claim that the agency interfered with law enforcement actions against Ross, Blandn or Meneses. He wrote well. Gary Webb sums up the story in his last major interview just days before his death. He celebrated his 62nd birthday in 2020. Despite some hyped phrasing, "Dark Alliance" appears to be praiseworthy investigative reporting."[47]. The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. Almost. For two years, Blum and Kerry supervised the interrogation of dozens of witnesses who described CIA-related drug deals in central America. In August 1996, Gary Webb published in the San Jose Mercury News a 20,000 word, three-part series entitled "Dark Alliance".The articles detailed the nexus between a California coke kingpin, CIA officials and assets and the Nicaraguan Contra army, whose . . "Looking back," she says, "I think Gary had been obsessed with suicide for some time. [72] A New York Times profile of Webb in June 1997 noted that two of his series written for the Cleveland Plain Dealer had resulted in lawsuits that the paper had settled. She said the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. *, 'Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion' is published in the UK by Seven Stories Press, priced 11.99, Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. [60], It found nothing to support the claim that "the drug trafficking activities of Blandn and Meneses were motivated by any commitment to support the Contra cause or Contra activities undertaken by CIA." "Ross," his report went on, dealt "on a scale never before conceived," with "a staggering turnover" of "50 to 100 kilos of cocaine a day". News coverage noted that there were widespread rumors on the Internet at the time that Webb had been killed as retribution for his "Dark Alliance" series, published eight years before. But the tragedy had a deeper meaning. The Pariah. Although he attended Northern Kentucky for four years, he did not finish his degree. The first detailed article on the series's claims appeared in The Washington Post in early October. Webb, whose plans to become a journalist had begun when he was 13, but never included equine death notices, resigned from the Mercury News a few months later. The men were identified as 29-year-old Gary Webb and 24-year-old Jacob Gipson. He told me: 'If I can't do what I want to do, what's the point?' Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings. His behavior became increasingly unpredictable and he embarked on a series of affairs, eventually divorcing from his wife Sue in 2000. . The Department of Justice Inspector-General's report was released on July 23, 1998. "But that," pointed out Blum, who is now a Washington attorney, "in no way - in no way - diminishes the wrongness of what these bastards did. Few reporters I've known could match his nose for an investigative story. The story had little immediate impact. Webb followed up Baca's leads at the California State Library, examining Congressional records and FBI reports. I believe that we fell short at every step of our process: in the writing, editing and production of our work. The link between drug-running and the Reagan regime's support for the right-wing terrorist group throughout the 1980s had been public knowledge for over a decade. The response from the American press took two months to arrive. Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns? "He started having motorcycle crashes," Bell says. After the series's publication, the Northern California branch of the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996. The Sad Saga of Gary Webb . Asking why crack became so prevalent in the Black community of Los Angeles, the article credited Blandn, referring to him as "the Johnny Appleseed of crack in California. According to Schou, the investigation "confirmed key chunks of Webb's allegations." Webb came home and put his belongings in order, dropping his Kentucky Post poster in the bin. [21] This artwork proved controversial, and The Mercury News later removed it. Webb disagreed with this conclusion.[1][2]. Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA. Contact Scott Herhold . Gary Webb was at his desk in the Mercury News's Sacramento office, in July 1995, when he received a message to call Coral Baca, a Hispanic woman from the San Francisco Bay area, allegedly connected to a Colombian drug cartel. "Report on Alleged Involvement: Findings" 43. He recently told the American Journalism Review (whose scrupulously researched piece, by Susan Paterno, is the only serious documentation of the Webb case I could find anywhere in the orthodox American media) that Webb's critics in rival newspapers, "quoted these CIA guys - who had a tremendous amount to hide - as though they were telling the truth. When Webb pressed the Mercury News to allow him to investigate the LA connection further, his own newspaper issued a retraction which earned its editor, Jerry Ceppos, wide praise from rival publications, but effectively disowned Webb, who then suffered the kind of corporate lynching that reporters are usually expected to dispense rather than endure. Webb chose the second option. Writing on the Los Angeles Times opinion page, Schou said, "Webb asserted, improbably, that the Blandn-Meneses-Ross drug ring opened 'the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles,' helping to 'spark a crack explosion in urban America.' As The Independent reported, in an interview with Gary's ex-wife Susan Webb: He was no villain: He genuinely believed his thesis about the CIA. Ross was a major drug dealer in Los Angeles. On December 10th, 2004 Gary Webb was found dead of two (allegedly self inflicted) gun shots to the head. GARY WEBB OBITUARY Gary Frank Webb Sept. 27, 1944 - Oct. 23, 2022 Gary passed away peacefully of complications following cardiovascular surgery. When I first heard the news, I tell Bell, I was inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that still proliferate on the internet, suggesting that Webb had been assassinated - either by one of the drug dealers he'd met while writing Dark Alliance, or by the intelligence services who were supposed to police them. He is from United States. On December 10th, 2004 Gary Webb was found dead of two (allegedly self-inflicted) gunshots to the head. 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics. Webb joined the Mercury News in 1988, via the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He also stated "the series presented dangerous ideas" by suggesting "crimes of state had been committed" (i.e. His assignments included investigating racial profiling by the California Highway Patrol and charges that the Oracle Corporation had received a no-bid contract award of $95 million in 2001. The series follows the stories of several characters whose lives are fated to intersect including CIA operative Teddy McDonald who helps to secure guns for the Contras. Furthermore, the duo has been blessed with two daughters, Persia Numan and Raven Numan. After being reassigned to the Mercury News's office in Curpertino, where they had him writing death notices, Gary Webb resigned and fell into depression. Cuts and amendments were made at the request of Ceppos, executive editor of the Mercury News, and Webb's immediate editor Dawn Garcia, among others. [29] Waters urged the CIA, the Department of Justice, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate. [20] The website artwork showed the silhouette of a man smoking a crack pipe superimposed over the CIA seal. "I think the behaviour of the media in all of this has been amazing," says Bell. Osborn, Barbara Bliss (MarchApril 1998). Gary Webb was a US Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who broke the story of the CIA involvement in the importation of cocaine into the U.S. "[78], While finding this part of the series unsupported, Schou said that some of the series's claims on CIA involvement are supported, writing that "The CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade." The series. His erstwhile editors on the Mercury News, meanwhile, saw their careers thrive. Garcia responded by email but declined to speak on the record about the editing process of Webb's series. On the last day Webb was alive, his motorbike broke down while he was moving to his mother's house. The drugs went to South Central LA. When facts didn't fit his theory, he tended to shove them to the sidelines. Kill the Messenger, a movie starring Jeremy Renner, just opened, about the life and death of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb, who committed suicide in 2004. The reports of the three federal investigations into the claims of "Dark Alliance" were not released until over a year after the series's publication. Webb put in a call to Robert Parry. Gary Webb, Into the Buzzsaw, CH 13, Prometheus Books. ", "After Gary died," she says, "a reporter from the LA Times came here. The third article discussed the social effects of the crack trade, noting that it had a disparate effect on African-Americans. The other article, citing interviews with current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials, questioned the importance of the drug dealers discussed in the series, both in the crack cocaine trade and in supporting the Nicaraguan Contras' fight against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Such a case normally would have sparked little notice. "I had to warn Gary that what he was looking at was probably true, but that he would run very big risks," Parry recalls. When his medical insurance expired, he stopped taking his antidepressants. While working at the legislature, Webb continued to do freelance investigative reporting, sometimes based on his investigative work. [51], The editors met with Webb several times in February to discuss the results of the paper's internal review and eventually decided to print neither Carey's draft article nor the articles Webb had filed. "By the end of his life he was just in a lot of pain," said Webb's ex-wife, Susan Bell. He was born in Hammersmith, London. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. "He definitely was depressed. [citation needed], Views on Webb's journalism have been polarized. The article suggested this was in retribution for Ross' testimony in the corruption case. His death was especially traumatic to the family since - as the coroner said - it could not be established whether he died instantly, or bled to death. "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. "Allow Gary Webb to be there [in the CIA investigation]," a heckler shouts. And he finallyyou know, they finally left the country. "[74] Mary Anne Sharkey, Webb's editor at The Plain Dealer, told writer Alicia Shepard in 1997 that Webb was known as 'the carpenter' "because he had everything nailed down. There is a CIA connection and I can demonstrate it.'". Blandn and Meneses' high-volume supply of low-priced high-purity cocaine "allowed Ross to sew up the Los Angeles market and move on. While police were preparing the case against her boyfriend, Baca alleged, officers had disclosed documents which revealed that one of her lover's associates had been working for the Contras. Shortly before I left for Sacramento, Moreira, who knew Webb, had shown me unbroadcast footage which shows the French reporter making a phone call to a media commentator in the US, asking him about Webb's death. A January 1997 article in American Journalism Review noted that a 1994 series Webb wrote had also been the subject of a Mercury News internal review that criticized Webb's reporting. [61] According to the report, it used Webb's reporting and writing as "key resources in focusing and refining the investigation." After a lengthy battle with cancer, Beth Webb, wife of Pastor Gary Webb at Grace Polaris Church, Westerville, Ohio, was released from her earthly suffering and passed into the presence of Jesus on Wednesday afternoon. Blandn and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. In addition, Gary left multiple suicide notes to family members which were confirmed to be in his own hand by them. Webb's continuing reporting also triggered a fourth investigation. Gary Webb, a hero of authentic journalism, an inspiration to truth-seekers around the world, a friend to all of us at Narco News, but now an unemployable outcast in the world of commercial newspapers, took his own life on December 10, 2004. The legendary civil-rights activist Dick Gregory was arrested while he protested outside the CIA's headquarters; Gregory began referring to the organisation as "Crack in America". Much of the article highlighted the failure of law enforcement agencies to successfully prosecute them and stated that this was largely due to their Contra and CIA connections. In . Edmund Webb: Birthdate: estimated between 1751 and 1805 : Death: Immediate Family: Son of Edmund Webb and Nancy Webb Husband of Milly Clark Brother of Daniel Gary Webb; Nancy Lester; Polly Webb; John Webb; Elizabeth "Betsey" Webb and 1 other. The collection, The Killing Game: Selected Stories from the Author of Dark Alliance, was edited by Webb's son, Eric. He concluded, "How did these shortcomings occur? His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. "[38], Surprised by The Washington Post article, The Mercury News's executive editor Jerome Ceppos wrote to the Post defending the series. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. They failed because the climate was more sceptical then. And when he got something in his head, he was determined to do it. In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los Angeles drug dealers. 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