A reporter who cannot work cannot feed his family. The series was published in The Mercury News in three parts, from August 18–20, 1996, with one long article and one or two shorter articles appearing each day. And that criticism came like a tidal wave — after a brief blackout. Then take a look at 37 startling photos of 1980s New York City, when crack was king. In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los Angeles drug dealers. The CIA denied the charges, and every major newspaper in the country took the agency's word for it. Oct. 7, 1996. the U.S. government was complicit in drug smuggling, 37 startling photos of 1980s New York City, when crack was king. The Gary Webb who suddenly loomed up nationally with this bad talk about the CIA and drugs was a long time … It was clear that Blandón and Meneses had connections to the FDN, and it was a known fact that the FDN was backed by the CIA, but Webb failed to make a compelling case for Blandón’s and Meneses’ direct connection to the CIA. Webb, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, exposed CIA drug trafficking operations in a series of books and reports for the San Jose Mercury News. When DEA agent Celerino Castillo III, who was assigned to El Salvador, heard that the Contras were flying cocaine out of a Salvadoran airport and into the U.S., he began logging flights — including flight numbers and pilot names. Reporter Jesse Katz, who two years prior had written a profile of “Freeway Rick” Ross describing him as “a criminal mastermind…most responsible for flooding Los Angeles streets with mass-marketed cocaine” did a complete about face and characterized Ross as just one small player in a sprawling landscape of L.A. crack dealers. Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images. In January, it was revealed that the DEA allows Mexico’s biggest cartel to traffic drugs in the US in exchange for information. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. “It was really the central defining event of his career and of his life.”. Soon enough, according to Webb, the FDN set its sights on the poor, black neighborhood of South-Central Los Angeles — and rendered it ground zero of the 1980s crack epidemic. He participated in a panel discussion called, “Connections, Coverage, and Casualties: The Continuing Story of the CIA and Drugs.” Sept. 11, 1997. At best, they knew about it for years and did absolutely nothing to stop it. Was he involved in drugs? “He has been extraordinarily helpful,” said O’Neale to Blandón’s judge while arguing for his release. She pushed the government to investigate Webb’s findings. From this bank the monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”. According to Esquire, Ross raked in more than $900 million in the 1980s, with a profit encroaching on $300 million (nearly $1 billion in today’s dollars). The “Dark Alliance” saga began as a matter of, “Look what horrible things the government may be implicated in.” But it turned into, “Look at what a sloppy journalist Gary Webb is.”. L.A.’s drug lords had come up with a way to make cocaine cheaper and more potent: cooking it into “crack.” And nobody spread the plague of crack as far and wide as Ricky Donnell “Freeway Rick” Ross. I told the L.A. Times reporter that American history owed a great debt to Gary Webb because he had forced out important facts about Reagan-era crimes. But I don’t know where these guys get these big aircraft.”. He was forced to sell his home in 2004, but on moving day he shot himself in the head with two .38-caliber bullets. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, all of which had ignored or downplayed evidence of CIA complicity in the drug trade for years, attacked the series, at times on the basis of claims that Webb did not actually make. All of this and more was later backed up by Blandón himself, after he became an informant for the DEA and took the stand as the Justice Department’s key witness in a 1996 drug trial. It was as a direct result that he noticed a flaw in his conviction, which subsequently led to a successful appeal. Like the other major papers, the Times relied on the very hyperbole and selective reporting in its own takedown series that it criticized Webb of committing. A cover-up with devastating consequences. The CIA did not kill him, but they killed his reputation which led to the same thing. It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? Ray Tamarra/GC Images“Freeway” Rick Ross didn’t know how to read until he taught himself at the age of 28 while imprisoned. It was also posted on The Mercury News website with additional information, including documents cited in the series and audio recordings of people quoted in the articles. Meanwhile, Blandón testified that his drug ring sold close to one ton of cocaine in the U.S. in 1981 alone. —Charles Bowden in Esquire (September 1998) "A standing room only crowd of several hundred people … June 24, 2015.New York City, New York. He resigned from the paper by the end of the year, and his reputation was so tarnished that he couldn’t get a good job anywhere else. Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty ImagesU.S. An investigative journalist, Gary Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. He resigned from the paper shortly afterward, accepting a position as an investigator for the California state legislature. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Teenage Contra rebels at a training camp in Nicaragua. — the biggest impact it had was on Gary Webb’s life. Gary Webb was ruined. Then, on October 4, the Washington Post published a scathing “investigation” declaring that “available information does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed contras — or Nicaraguans in general — played a major role in the emergence of crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States.” Even though Webb’s article focused on southern California, not the U.S. in general. “Once you take away a journalist’s credibility, that’s all they have,” said Schou. All three papers ignored evidence already out there — including a mostly ignored Associate Press report from 1985 and a House Subcommittee from 1989 that found that “U.S. "Two years ago, Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that said some bad things about the CIA and drug traffickers. From 1981 to 1986, Blandón seemed to be protected by invisible higher-ups that quietly held jurisdiction over local authorities. The CIA and other arms of the … View Gary Webb’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community. This drug smuggling into the United States, according to Webb, helped to fuel the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Blandón was just a smooth-talking guy with an unending stash of cheap cocaine. “Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they [DEA officials] were covering it up,” he told Webb. Gary has 3 jobs listed on their profile. Webb began researching "Dark Alliance" in July 1995. Los Angeles. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Webb spent hours talking with Ross at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, where he found that Ross knew nothing about Blandón’s past at all. “How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ross,” he wrote. Jerry Ceppos, then the executive editor of the Mercury News, wrote an open letter to readers in May 2017 rescinding support for Webb’s reporting and listing the editorial flaws in “Dark Alliance.”. He retired in 1991. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, called the affair “one of the worst official abuses in our nation’s history.”. Los Angeles. I’d say that was some fucked up shit there,” said Ross. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.”. “And that’s what Mr. Bermudez [the CIA agent who instructed the FDN] told us in Honduras, OK? In a written statement to obtain a search warrant for Blandón’s sprawling cocaine operation, L.A. County sheriff’s Sergeant Tom Gordon confirmed that local drug agents knew about Blandón’s involvement with the CIA-backed Contras — all the way back in the mid-1980s: “Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern California… The monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo, who is a high-ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation. March 1999. But I added that the L.A. Times would be hard-pressed to write an honest obituary because the newspaper had not published a single word on the contents of the CIA inspector general's final report, which had largely vindicated Webb. Directed by Michael Cuesta. On December 10, 2004, after a long bout of depression, he died in an apparent suicide. Bob Berg/Getty ImagesThe CIA denied Gary Webb’s reporting, while his fellow journalists nitpicked Webb’s faults while failing to follow up on his claims. Webb, who just a few years prior had won a Pulitzer Prize, was reassigned to the Cupertino desk, where his thirst for investigative reporting went depressingly unquenched. Tom Landers/The Boston Globe/Getty ImagesProtestors march outside of the CIA’s Boston offices in the middle of winter to demonstrate against the war in Nicaragua. Gary Webb One piece of information that really caught my attention was the idea of putting a direct link inside your ebook where readers can post their review. Gary Webb, Aug. 14, 1998. Ross had only known him as Danilo, and figured he was regular guy with an entrepreneurial streak. In a sense, he was.”. Webb’s “dark alliance” consisted of a group of rebels trying to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua. Then came the San Jose Mercury News piece, a 20,000-word three-parter by Pulitzer Prize–winning staffer Gary Webb published under the title "Dark Alliance." Rep. Maxine Waters, representing a majority-minority district in Los Angeles, holds up an apparent package of cocaine for the press. His empire ultimately grew to 42 U.S. cities, but it all came tumbling down after Blandón, his main supplier, turned into a confidential informant. The CIA denied Gary Webb’s reporting, while his fellow journalists nitpicked Webb’s faults while failing to follow up on his claims. Gary Webb caught the writing bug in his early teens and started to hone his craft on his high school newspaper in Indiana. The Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguauense (FDN) guerrilla group was created in 1981 to oust the country’s socialist government. He participated in a panel discussion called, “Connections, Coverage, and Casualties: The Continuing Story of the CIA and Drugs.” Sept. 11, 1997. Later in 2014, Micheal Cuesta directed the biopic of Gary Webb named 'Kill the Messenger' depicting Jeramy Renner as Gary Webb. He was [my main source]. “[Webb] took the story where it seemed to lead — to the door of U.S. national security and drug enforcement agencies. He had kicked open an old trunk and discovered it full of worms — real worms, ugly and nasty. “He was almost like a godfather to me,” said Ross. While some Bay Area papers and talk radio, particularly black talk radio, pounced on the story, the country’s major newspapers and TV news networks remained mostly silent. Associate Professor of History, University of Minnesota, Duluth. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Tom Landers/The Boston Globe/Getty Images. "The cause of death was determined … I always encourage people to write reviews but I know that many of the readers who tell me they loved my books are intimidated by the very act of getting to the place where they can write the review on Amazon. Webb’s reporting uncovered the story of how tons of cocaine were shipped into San Francisco by supporters of the CIA-backed Contras and then distributed down to LA to a Nicaraguan named Danilo Blandon, who sold it to a street dealer from South Central, Freeway Rick Ross. “Freeway” Rick Ross said he was entirely unaware his rampant drug dealing in L.A. was funding this group of anti-Sandinistas in Central America. “He’s the one who got me going. “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 an arm of the contra guerrillas of Nicaragua run by the Central Intelligence Agency.”. Webb briefly returned to journalism in 2004 as a reporter for the weekly Sacramento News & Review, where he wrote a handful of stories. After reading about Gary Webb exposing the CIA’s potential complicity in L.A.’s crack epidemic, learn all about Nellie Bly, the pioneering investigative journalist who faked insanity to expose the inner workings of a Victorian-era insane asylum. Ross learned how to read at the age of 28 while imprisoned and found a legal loophole that set him free. A flood of inquiries about Gary Webb's shooting death prompts statement. The response to Webb’s series was impassioned. The CIA, amid a public relations “nightmare,” broke its policy of not commenting on any individual’s agency affiliation and denied Webb’s story entirely. “Freeway” Rick Ross didn’t know how to read until he taught himself at the age of 28 while imprisoned. “And they put me in jail? She pushed the government to investigate Webb’s findings. Webb won dozens of journalism awards while reporting early in his career for the Kentucky Post and, from 1983 through 1988, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland), but it was at the Mercury News, where he worked from 1988 through 1997, that he developed a national profile. With no legal recourse to topple the five-person junta that took Somoza’s place, CIA interests had to find alternative means to plant a figurehead of their choosing. Those people, he found, were backed by the CIA. Webb’s important historical role began in 1996 when his "Dark Alliance" investigative series for the San Jose Mercury News revived public interest in the CIA’s tolerance of cocaine trafficking by President Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan contra rebels in the 1980s, at a time when Reagan was promoting a “just say no/zero tolerance/war on drugs.” And it was then that Hector Berrellez accidentally discovered his jones: He loved working the streets with a badge. June 24, 2015.New York City, New York. Everybody I knew, I knew through him. Webb’s reporting ultimately panned out: We now know that the U.S. government was complicit in drug smuggling in order to support its foreign policy interests. Gary Webb, (born August 31, 1955, Corona, California, U.S.—died December 10, 2004, Carmichael, California), American investigative journalist who wrote a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 on connections between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S.-backed Contra army seeking to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist government, and cocaine trafficking into the United States. Steve Weinberg of The Baltimore Sun was one of the few who rationally defended Webb’s supposed guesswork. After gaining access to secret grand jury transcripts in 1996, and following the subsequent paper trail that followed therein, Gary Webb made the shocking discovery that government informant, Oscar Danilo Blandón, was covertly selling tons of cocaine for the Central Intelligence Agency in South Central Los Angeles, and other parts of the country. But the greatest criticism came from the Los Angeles Times, which assembled a 17-person team; one member remembered it being called the “get Gary Webb team.” On October 20, the L.A. paper — incensed that it had been scooped in its own backyard — began publishing a three-part series of its own. Dark Alliance was published as a book in 1998. In a three-part exposé, investigative journalist Gary Webb reported that a CIA-backed guerrilla army in Nicaragua had used crack cocaine sales in Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods to fund an attempted coup of Nicaragua’s socialist government in the 1980s — and that the CIA may very well have known about it. By Sam Stanton -- Bee Staff Writer Facing a barrage of calls from the media and the public, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office issued a statement Tuesday confirming that former investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide with two gunshots to the head.