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Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails. Blandn and Meneses' high-volume supply of low-priced high-purity cocaine "allowed Ross to sew up the Los Angeles market and move on. 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. By William Kennedy / Jan. 22, 2023 12:00 pm EST. Last edited on 10 February 2023, at 03:36, 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. 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. What was new about Webb's reports, published under the title "Dark Alliance" in the Californian paper the San Jose Mercury News, was that for the first time it brought the story back home. "Do not quote me. border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; Can these things possibly be? An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Some editors regarded him as stubborn to the point of insolence. He concluded, "How did these shortcomings occur? "Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. In February, Gary Webb gave his ex-wife. 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." He was assigned to its Sacramento bureau, where he was allowed to choose most of his own stories. *, '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. . [65], After leaving The Mercury News, Webb worked as an investigator for the California State Legislature. Should these editors subsequently deem the story to have been fatally flawed, they take the consequences. Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. He is the oldest son of Pulitzer Prize-winninginvestigative journalist Gary Webb, the subject of the 2014 film "Kill the Messenger," starring Hollywood heavyweight Jeremy Renner. padding-bottom: 20px; He is from United States. Talking about his wife, Mariah Webb is a nurse who also educates about essential products . Webb disagreed with this conclusion.[1][2]. It was written by Jesse Katz, the same reporter who, less than two years earlier, had described Ross's conglomerate as "the Wal-Mart of crack dealing". After Ceppos' column, The Mercury News spent the next several months conducting an internal review of the story. According to Schou, the investigation "confirmed key chunks of Webb's allegations." When it did, beginning with The Washington Post, it shocked Webb's critics as much as his many admirers. "Everyone got out and left the person who had made the noise - issued the report - alone. Her husband began his career on The Kentucky Post, and rapidly proved himself to be the sort of character who can be a secretive agency's worst nightmare: a full-blooded provocateur who liked to put the hours in at the library. [9], Webb's first major investigative work appeared in 1980, when the Cincinnati Post published "The Coal Connection," a seventeen-part series by Webb and Post reporter Thomas Scheffey. Gary Webb became, quite unfairly, the victim of one of the most extraordinary examples of piling on by the mainstream press, ever.". But the biggest loss he had was the writing. Every year since investigative journalist Gary Webb took his own life in 2004, I have marked the anniversary of that sad event by recalling the debt that American history owes to Webb for his. In the column, Ceppos defended parts of the article, writing that the series had "solidly documented" that the drug ring described in the series did have connections with the Contras and did sell large quantities of cocaine in inner-city Los Angeles. Then, in August the same year, the first of three instalments of "Dark Alliance" appeared. Jeff Leen, assistant managing editor for investigative reporting at The Washington Post, wrote in a 2014 opinion page article that "the report found no CIA relationship with the drug ring Webb had written about." 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. [56] He resigned from the paper in November 1997. Born January 3rd, 1943 in Montreal, Quebec, he was the son of the late John Douglas Webb and the late Jeannie (Penny) Hardie Penman. George Webb and Paul Cottrell have begun a weekly series on CoronaVirus now, Mondays at 5PM, EST on paul Cottrell's Rumble Channel. [54] Editors at the paper, on the other hand, felt that Webb had failed to tell them about information that contradicted the series's claims and that he "responded to concerns not with reasoned argument, but with accusations of us selling him out. Webb was an assertive figure who drove fast cars and powerful motorcycles, hung heavy metal posters in his office and, at certain times in his life, smoked a fair amount of cannabis. "[38], Surprised by The Washington Post article, The Mercury News's executive editor Jerome Ceppos wrote to the Post defending the series. "He was sleeping more, he hated to get up in the morning, he started having a lot of motorcycle. On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. It was just more than he could take.". Ricky Donnell "Freeway Rick" Ross (born January 26, 1960) is an American author and convicted drug trafficker best known for the drug empire he established in Los Angeles, California, in the early to mid 1980s. His. Despite some hyped phrasing, "Dark Alliance" appears to be praiseworthy investigative reporting."[47]. The whole business, I suggested to Blum, has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot. 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. The "Dark Alliance" series remains controversial. [5], After high school, Webb attended an Indianapolis community college on a scholarship until his family moved to Cincinnati. He had also lost his house the week before his suicide. One article, dealing mostly with the response of the Los Angeles Black community to the stories, described the series's evidence as "thin". Unable to get work from any major US newspaper, he spent the four months before his death writing for * a free-sheet covering the Sacramento area. Bell and her children helped Webb prepare 50 packages containing cuttings and his CV which they sent out to newspapers all over the US. According to Corn, Webb "was wrong on some important details, but he was, in a way, closer to the truth than many of his establishment media critics who neglected the story of the real CIA-contra-cocaine connection." If the antagonism of competing publications was predictable, what happened to Webb within his own newspaper was not. Like the CIA and Justice Department reports, it also found that neither Blandn, Meneses, nor Ross were associated with the CIA. According to the report's "Epilogue," the report was completed in December 1997 but was not released because the DEA was still attempting to use Danilo Blandn in an investigation of international drug dealers and was concerned that the report would affect the viability of the investigation. The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. "He told the guys with him he was fine," she recalls, "got back on the bike, then passed out, half an hour later. And he finallyyou know, they finally left the country. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress. Webb made his early reputation as a reporter with the Plain Dealer before going on to fame and turmoil at the San Jose Mercury News. But you say - dear God. Gary Douglas Webb of Radnor, PA, passed away on October 19, 2021. The first article, by Katz, developed a different picture of the origins of the crack trade than "Dark Alliance" had described, with more gangs and smugglers participating. Webb's ex-wife, Sue Bell, discounted theories Tuesday that her husband had been murdered, saying the 49-year-old Webb had been distraught for some time over his inability to get . Emma Lee Webb, age 75, of Crossett, AR passed away Monday February 27, 2023, in her home surrounded by her family. ", 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. In a three-part expos, investigative journalist Gary Webb reported that a 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 had purposefully funded it. The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors. [14] In 1984, Webb wrote a story titled Driving Off With Profits which claimed that the promoters of a race in Cleveland paid themselves nearly a million dollars from funds that should have gone to the city of Cleveland. He was the much-loved father of Lindsay (Stephen . "Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. [29] Waters urged the CIA, the Department of Justice, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate. ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". Gary is survived by his wife of 48 years, Beverly Webb; children Margaret . She said the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. Regarding issues raised in the series's shorter sidebar stories, it found that some in the government were "not eager" to have DEA agent Celerino Castillo "openly probe" activities at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador, where covert operations in support of the Contras were undertaken, and that the CIA had indeed intervened in a case involving smuggler Julio Zavala. "Although Ross had become a millionaire by 1984," Katz now wrote, "the market was so huge by then that even a dealer of his stature could seem dwarfed How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level," he continues, "had nothing to do with Ross". Then, on 10 December, he resigned. By the autumn of 1997, on medication for clinical depression, he was given leave of absence from the paper. [49], The paper also gave Webb permission to visit Central America again to get more evidence supporting the story. The room is decorated with his trophies: a Pulitzer prize hangs next to his HL Mencken award; also on the wall is a framed advertisement for The Kentucky Post. padding-left: 10px!important; But once the flak really started to fly, from the nation's grandest newspapers, Ceppos - having come under exactly what form of pressure it is difficult to know - printed a retraction which Webb dismissed as spineless. The Department of Justice Inspector-General's report was released on July 23, 1998. The feeling was that with other news outlets calling for Webb's head, the paper's credibility depended on their joining in on the attacks. But the report was correct. margin: 0 45px; It also stated that the Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Eli Tomac on track during Media Day at Daytona International Speedway, Friday, March 3, 2023. Gary Webb's painstaking investigation and the incindiary conclusions he drew from it were based mostly on public records, as detailed in the "notes on sources" section in "Dark Alliance", including: undercover audio tapes, declassified government documents from the CIA, DEA, FBI, L.A. Sheriff's Department, files from the Iran-Contra . [19] The series was published in The Mercury News in three parts, from Sunday, 18 August 1996 to 20 August 1996, with a first long article and one or two shorter articles appearing each day. [10] The series, which examined the murder of a coal company president with ties to organized crime, won the national Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for reporting from a small newspaper. "[80], Not all writers agree that the Inspector-General's report supported the series's claims. While working at the legislature, Webb continued to do freelance investigative reporting, sometimes based on his investigative work. But the tragedy had a deeper meaning. In a three-part series published in the San Jose Mercury News, "Dark Alliance," Webb alleges that not only was the CIA aware cocaine sold in the U.S. during the 1980s was funding the Nicaraguan Contras, they were complicit in its distribution. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. When he was engaged, he worked hard. Corrie had primary biliary cirrhosis, a genetic liver disease that already had. By the end of September, three federal investigations had been announced: an investigation into the CIA allegations conducted by CIA Inspector-General Frederick Hitz, an investigation into the law enforcement allegations by Justice Department Inspector-General Michael Bromwich, and a second investigation into the CIA by the House Intelligence Committee. Like Schou, Corn cites the inspector general's report, which he says "acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drugrunners (sic) while supporting the contras. She was a native of Minden, LA, but a resident of Crossett for 65 years. By: E&P Staff The death of investigative reporter Gary Webb has been confirmed as a suicide, according to a coroner's statement. "And to an extent, they succeeded.". Gary Webb's Ex-Wife Set to Attend New York Premiere By Richard Horgan October 8, 2014 Cleveland Plain Dealer film critic Clint O'Connor had a solid feature the other day about Kill the. They failed because the climate was more sceptical then. When his medical insurance expired, he stopped taking his antidepressants. [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." But his central thesis - that the CIA, having participated in narcotics trafficking in central America, had, at best, turned a blind eye to the activities of drug dealers in LA - has never been in question. This is why Webb's "Dark Alliance" series is an essential source, a primary text that every journalism student should study. My wife has kept me grounded for . LOS ANGELES, Dec. 12 - Gary Webb, a reporter who won national attention with a series of articles, later discredited, linking the Central Intelligence Agency to the spread of crack . [39] Carey's critique appeared in mid-October and went through several of the Post's criticisms of the series, including the importance of Blandn's drug ring in spreading crack, questions about Blandn's testimony in court, and how specific series allegations about CIA involvement had been, giving Webb's responses. 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. But as Krim told Webb's biographer Nick Schou, "The zeal that helped make Gary a relentless reporter was coupled with an inability to question himself, to entertain the notion that he might have erred. A secret deal allowed drugs to go unreported by the DCI. [51] After discussions with Webb, the column was published on May 11, 1997.[53]. Gary was preceded in death by his mother and father, Donna and James Webb of Carpentersville. When his body was found, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was on the DVD machine, and his favourite CD, Ian Hunter's live album Welcome to the Club, was in the CD player. He was a former member of Bethlehem . After examining the investigations and prosecutions of the main figures in the series, Blandn, Meneses and Ross, it concluded that "Although the investigations suffered from various problems of communication and coordination, their successes and failures were determined by the normal dynamics that affect the success of scores of investigations of high-level drug traffickers These factors, rather than anything as spectacular as a systematic effort by the CIA or any other intelligence agency to protect the drug trafficking activities of Contra supporters, determined what occurred in the cases we examined. When facts didn't fit his theory, he tended to shove them to the sidelines. Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. . [17] The Mercury News's coverage of the earthquake won its staff the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1990. It was an amazing scoop - but one that would ruin his career and drive him to suicide. One instalment of the LA Times's 18,000-word rebuttal of Webb's piece, published in October 1996, sought to minimise the importance of his key witness, Ricky Ross. "If there was an eye to the storm," Katz wrote, "if there was a mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw most responsible for flooding LA's streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick. In May 1997, after an internal review, Ceppos stated that, although the story was right on many important points, there were shortcomings in the writing, editing and production of the series. Garry Webb wrote the 1996 "Dark Alliance" series for the San Jose. What he found, he wrote later, "nearly knocked me off my chair". As a result, some major US newspapers ignored its findings completely, while others relegated a brief summary to their inside pages. [67], Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. Even 10 years after his tragic death, the media refuse to let him rest. In the six years he worked at its Sacramento office, he won the HL Mencken award, for a story exposing corruption in California's drug enforcement agency, and his Pulitzer prize - won jointly, as part of a Mercury News team covering the 1990 Loma Prieta earthquake. Webb's corpse was found in the bedroom, with two gunshot wounds to the head. He was a writer, known for Kill the Messenger (2014), Filming in Georgia (2015) and Crack in America (2015). ". Jack Blum, who was the lead investigator for Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, which produced a highly damning 1989 report on drug-smuggling in the guise of national security, is one of several commentators to have questioned aspects of Webb's original reporting.

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