In a 2013 article in the LA Weekly, Schou wrote that Webb was "vindicated by a 1998 CIA Inspector General report, which revealed that for more than a decade the agency had covered up a business relationship it had with Nicaraguan drug dealers like Blandn. She said the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. 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. [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. Should these editors subsequently deem the story to have been fatally flawed, they take the consequences. Calling the Post's overall focus "misplaced", Overholser expressed regret that the paper had not taken the opportunity to re-examine whether the CIA had overlooked Contra involvement in drug smuggling, "a subject The Post and the public had given short shrift. "[58], It also concluded that "the claims that Blandn and Meneses were responsible for introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and spreading the crack epidemic throughout the country were unsupported." Webb is best known for his "Dark Alliance" series, which appeared in The Mercury News in 1996. "[77], Webb's reporting in "Dark Alliance" remains controversial. But ultimately, the responsibility was, and is, mine.". It concluded, however, that these problems were "a far cry from the type of broad manipulation and corruption of the federal criminal justice system suggested by the original allegations.". By the late spring of 1996, Webb was ready to publish. The whole business, I suggested to Blum, has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot. "He thought I was being cowardly. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting for a series of stories on the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct during northern California's 1989 earthquake. "Gary was given the choice of relocating either to San Jose," says Bell, "or to Cupertino". "He had six in a short period of time." [67], Webb later moved to the State Assembly's Office of Majority Services. Webb's research took a year, in the course of which he received death threats. [41], When the Los Angeles Times series appeared, Ceppos again wrote to defend the original series. 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. There were no offers. It would have been our 25th wedding anniversary," Bell recalls. An editorial in the Times, while criticizing the series for making "unsubstantiated charges", conceded that it did find "drug-smuggling and dealing by Nicaraguans with at least tentative connections to the Contras" and called for further investigation. 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. "Do not quote me. On December 10th, 2004 Gary Webb was found dead of two (allegedly self-inflicted) gunshots to the head. 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. Depressed, he became increasingly unpredictable in his behaviour and embarked on a series of affairs; he was divorced from Bell in 2000, though he remained close to her throughout his life and lived in a house in nearby Carmichael. His. 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 hard-charging investigative reporter's career imploded in the wake of his much-criticized "Dark Alliance" series about the CIA and crack cocaine. The CIA denied the charges, and every major newspaper in the country . Meneses, an established smuggler and a Contra supporter as well, taught Blandn how to smuggle and provided him with cocaine. His former wife, her voice lowered to a whisper, explains that Webb missed with the first shot (which exited through his left cheek). 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. 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. 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. 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 coroner's staff concluded that the second shot hit an artery.[70]. After a local newspaper reported that Webb had died from multiple gunshots, the coroner's office received so many calls asking about Webb's death that Sacramento County Coroner Robert Lyons issued a statement confirming Webb had died by suicide. "Gary Webb was left to fend for himself. Webb's ex wife, Susan Bell told reporters that she believed Webb had died by suicide. It found that Blandn received permanent resident status "in a wholly improper manner" and that for some time the Department "was not certain whether to prosecute Meneses, or use him as a cooperating witness." [50] By January, Webb filed drafts of four more articles based on his trip, but his editors concluded that the new articles would not help shore up the original series's claims. He told me: 'If I can't do what I want to do, what's the point?' Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails. She was born July 22, 1964 in Jellico, Tennessee. A revised version was published in 1999 that incorporated Webb's response to the CIA and Justice Department reports. Nobody who heads a government agency can let such an allegation stand.". He was the journalist who wrote a famous-or infamous-1996 series for the San Jose Mercury News that maintained a CIA-supported drug ring based in Los Angeles had triggered the. reports. 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.' 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. He also stated "the series presented dangerous ideas" by suggesting "crimes of state had been committed" (i.e. The claim that the drug ring of Meneses-Blandn-Ross sparked the "crack explosion" has been perhaps the most criticized part of the series. 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. He made that very clear. 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. [8] In 1979, Webb married Susan Bell; the couple eventually had three children. And it ruined that reporter's career. E&P Staff. [71] When asked by local reporters about the possibility of two gunshots being a suicide, Lyons replied "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots, but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility." We had been here before." When removal men arrived, on the morning of 10 December 2004, they found a sign on his front door, which read: ''Please do not enter. 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. [28] Maxine Waters, the representative for California's 35th district, which includes South-Central Los Angeles, was also outraged by the articles and became one of Webb's strongest supporters. "They tried to make us look like crazies," says Blum. Dr. Gary A. Webb is a geriatrician in Marco Island, Florida. Webb's ex wife, Susan Bell told reporters that she believed Webb had died by suicide. But you say - dear God. Webb's continuing reporting also triggered a fourth investigation. Although Blandn's cartel was undoubtedly one of the first to bring crack to LA, Webb was almost certainly suffering a rush of blood when he described the group as "the first pipeline" into the city. 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. [40] Ceppos also asked reporter Pete Carey to write a critique of the series for publication in The Mercury News, and had the controversial website artwork changed. When she got indignant," she adds, "he went to meet her.". But Webb had one huge blind side: He was fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness. As it turned out," she adds, "that was not their intent.". [16] As part of The Mercury News team that covered the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Webb and his colleague Pete Carey wrote a story examining the causes of the collapse of the Cypress Street Viaduct. I have also followed up on key topics raised by Paul Cottrell will leading industry experts like Dr. Peter McCollough on the Tommy Carrigan Show, weekly in 2021 and 2022. 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. [34], The Los Angeles Times devoted the most space to the story, publishing a three-part series called "The Cocaine Trail." He was previously married to Sue Bell. He is from United States. He was born January 28, 1950 in Middletown, OH to Paul and Dorothy (Hawkins) Webb. Webb came late to the. Video courtesy of documentary FREEWAY: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM premiering on Al Jazeera America in early 2015. "The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post", he stated. (Strawser) Webb. Age 57 of Newcomb, Tennessee passed away Friday, August 20, 2021 at the Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center. "I believe that Americans, as a nation, are mainly concerned with living their happy little lives. When he told me, I said it sounded crazy. "I think Kerry learnt a lesson from all this," reporter Robert Parry says. ". 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. [18], Webb began researching "Dark Alliance" in July 1995. Beth Ann Webb May 10, 1962 - May 22, 2019. "[62] It also found no evidence to support Webb's suggestion that several other drug smugglers mentioned in the series were associated with the CIA, or that anyone associated with the CIA or other intelligence agencies was involved in supplying or selling drugs in Los Angeles.[62]. "The first story he had to file was about a police horse which had died of constipation.". [51] After discussions with Webb, the column was published on May 11, 1997.[53]. 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. [17] The Mercury News's coverage of the earthquake won its staff the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1990. He also had this inherent belief that the truth could not harm him. 'Dark Alliance' - both as journalism and as a book - is a convoluted narrative, but the crucial link it establishes is between the "agricultural salesman" Oscar Danilo Blandn, a Contra sympathiser with close CIA links, and his best customer, an LA drug dealer known as "Freeway" Ricky Ross. GARY WEBB OBITUARY Gary Frank Webb Sept. 27, 1944 - Oct. 23, 2022 Gary passed away peacefully of complications following cardiovascular surgery. Gary Webb was an investigative reporter, focusing on government and private sector corruption and winning more than 30 journalism awards. Gary Webb, a journalist at The San Jose Mercury News, thought it was a far-fetched story to begin with, but in 1995 and 1996, he dug in and produced a deeply reported and deeply flawed three-part . He then transferred to nearby Northern Kentucky University. Webb, unlike Blum or Kerry, had to face his difficulties alone. In 1997 Ceppos was awarded the US Society of Professional Journalists' National Ethics Award. "People told me that," she says. For instance, he published an article on racial profiling in traffic stops in Esquire magazine, in April 1999. The response from the American press took two months to arrive. But Webb Gary Stephen Webb (August 31, 1955 - December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist. "He definitely was depressed. Gary was preceded in death by his mother and father, Donna and James Webb of Carpentersville. 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. But "Dark Alliance" was also posted on the Mercury News's website, with the image of a crack smoker superimposed on the CIA badge. Webb, one of the boldest and most outstanding reporters of his generation, was the journalist who, in 1996, established the connection between the CIA and major drug dealers in Los Angeles, some of whose profits had been channelled to fund the Contra guerrilla movement in Nicaragua. "[79], Writing after Webb's death in 2005, The Nation magazine's former Washington Editor David Corn said that Webb "was on to something but botched part of how he handled it." Two years later, he was promoted to Vice President of Knight Ridder, the Mercury News's parent company; he retired from this position last month. He is survived by his loving wife, Wendie, of Elgin; grandmother, Eileen Carrier of Elgin;. . When his medical insurance expired, he stopped taking his antidepressants. He was taken to hospital by air ambulance. Gary Webb, friends say, was a far more combative character than either the Mercury News's executive editor Ceppos or page editor Garcia. [66] He received his medical degree from American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine and has been in practice for more than 20 . His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. Webb established incontrovertible links * between Ricky Ross and Blandn who, two years later, would betray Ross to the authorities. The Mercury News, who originally stood by Webb's reporting, complied with these new denunciations and published an apology for the series in May 1997. "It sounds crazy," says Bell, "but having his motorbike stolen was the last straw. Survivors include his wife, Karla Webb; their children, Kimberly Ware and husband, Kyle, Laci Higgins and husband, Wesley, Kenna Logan and Heath Webb and . 17 years ago, Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that said some bad things about the CIA and drug traffickers. It reads: "There should be no fetters on reporters, nor must they tamper with the truth, but give light so the people will find their own way." 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. I felt she really trashed me. He really did believe that," she says. "For the better part of a decade," it began, "a San Francisco drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funnelled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the US Central Intelligence Agency.". [3], Webb was born in Corona, California. The Media Turns On Gary Webb. 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. 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. "It was the worst day of my life." The real Gary Webb talks about his 1996 story "Dark Alliance," which criticizes the CIA's involvement (or lack thereof) with regard to the cocaine coming into the U.S. during the 1980s. "That's right," says Blum. On the last day Webb was alive, his motorbike broke down while he was moving to his mother's house. [55] Webb eventually chose Cupertino, but was unhappy with the routine stories he was reporting there and the long commute. One of his last articles examined America's Army, a video game designed by the U.S. [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. [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. I realise now he was thinking about suicide.". "You do not understand the power of these people," he adds, referring to the US intelligence services. Gary Webb was born in Corona, California, in 1955. Webb, a former San Jose Mercury News reporter, was found dead in his Carmichael home Friday morning. 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. She and Gary were married from 1979 to 2000 and had three children. It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? 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. Ceppos initially defended Webb, and reportedly showed up at an in-house party wearing a military helmet. But while Webb overreached, some key findings in "Dark Alliance" were on target-and important. Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns? GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. At the end of March, Ceppos told Webb that he was going to present the internal review findings in a column. [43] He did this in a column that appeared on November 3, defending the series, but also committing the paper to a review of major criticisms. 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. That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been willing to stand up and risk it all.". [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. Ceppos and Garcia have long since lost any taste for public discussion of "Dark Alliance". GARY WEBB OBITUARY. And the importance of exposing them. 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." Webb discusses the "Dark Alliance" controversy, including the government's refusal to respond to his story and the media's desire to kill it. "[25] It also found disparities in the treatment of Black and White traffickers in the justice system, contrasting the treatment of Blandn and Ross after their arrests for drug trafficking. Who Is Gary Webb's Wife? "Allow Gary Webb to be there [in the CIA investigation]," a heckler shouts. "By the end of his life he was just in a lot of pain," said Webb's ex-wife, Susan Bell. It's . 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. March 13, 1954 December 19, 2021 Gary Lynn Webb, 67, entered the kingdom of his heavenly father in the early morning of December 19, 2021. Ross was also released early after cooperating in an investigation of police corruption, but was rearrested a few months later in a sting operation arranged with Blandn's help. Tara Becker-Gray Lee News Network Jan 17, 2019 0 1 of 2 C. Webb The body found at a house fire at 13308 95th Ave. in rural Blue Grass on Thursday night has been identified as Cynthia Webb, 59.. Notably, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times ran articles calling his allegations unfounded. Webb's then-wife Sue remembers coming home from the shops and finding her. "Like enjoy it.". If he could have chosen his own epitaph, it might have been a line from the letter he posted to Bell, immediately before he killed himself: "I do not regret," Webb told her, "anything that I have written." [21] This artwork proved controversial, and The Mercury News later removed it. 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. Its pointed to as one of the clearer cases of CIA intervention as revenge for Webb revealing damaging secrets about the agencies involvement in drug smuggling. He was a former member of Bethlehem . By this stage, he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. [65], Within "The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On" essay Webb stated he believed there was an active "collusion between the press and the powerful" to report freely on inconsequential matters, "but when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff We begin to see the limits of our freedoms". He concluded, "How did these shortcomings occur? Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . He wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, which initially backed his articles but later dropped him. The Pariah. A man who was wrongfully arrested and sent to prison on remand has been awarded 100,000 in compensation from Police Scotland. [49], The paper also gave Webb permission to visit Central America again to get more evidence supporting the story. "[75], Jonathan Krim, The Mercury News editor who recruited Webb from The Plain Dealer and who supervised The Mercury News internal review of "Dark Alliance," told AJR editor Paterno that Webb "had all the qualities you'd want in a reporter: curious, dogged, a very high sense of wanting to expose wrongdoing and to hold private and public officials accountable." In an unprecedented move, the then CIA director John Deutch was dispatched to address community leaders in the Watts district of LA. ", 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. 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. It was just more than he could take.". Instead, he found work in 1978 as a reporter at the Kentucky Post, a local paper affiliated with the larger Cincinnati Post. ", "Reporter's suicide confirmed by coroner", "Repercussions From Flawed News Articles", "Herhold: Thinking back on journalist Gary Webb and the CIA", Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for "Tawdry" Attacks, "Gary Webb was no journalism hero, despite what 'Kill the Messenger' says", "Jeremy Renner's 'Kill the Messenger' Gets Fall Release Date", The CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy: A Review of the Justice Department's Investigations and Prosecutions, United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, Report of Investigation Concerning Allegations of Connections Between CIA and The Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States, Central Intelligence Agency Office of the Inspector General, United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, "Secrecy, Conspiracy, and the Media During the CIA-Contra Affair", Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography, "Inside the Dark Alliance: Gary Webb on the CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion", 'A NATURAL STORY': Tribute to 'Dark Alliance' and Journalist Gary Webb, San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, Archive of Gary Webb stories at Sacramento News and Review, "Frontline: Cocaine, Conspiracy Theories & the C.I.A. in Central America", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gary_Webb&oldid=1149653447, This page was last edited on 13 April 2023, at 15:41. The complete lack of desire to ask the difficult questions makes me want to scream. [57], The report covered actions by Department of Justice employees in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the DEA, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and U.S. And when he got something in his head, he was determined to do it. Gary Webb, 49, an investigative reporter who wrote a widely criticized series linking the CIA to the explosion of crack cocaine in Los Angeles, was found dead Dec. 10 at his home near. 3) The series oversimplified how the crack epidemic grew. ", Webb had already been cremated and his ashes scattered in the bay off Santa Cruz two weeks before. One of these was a 1986 raid on Blandn's drug organization by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, which the article suggested had produced evidence of CIA ties to drug smuggling that was later suppressed. 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