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"[2], Ceppos noted that Webb did not agree with these conclusions. 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. [48] Despite the controversy that soon overtook the series, and the request of one board member to reconsider, the branch's board went ahead with the award in November. In February last year he was laid off by the State Legislature. Although he attended Northern Kentucky for four years, he did not finish his degree. To Read the Full Story Become an Adweek+ Subscriber. By William Kennedy / Jan. 22, 2023 12:00 pm EST. Steven Webb . . color:rgb(46,179,178); His was the story of a man who gains information of wrongdoing, then, attempting to act in the public interest, seeks protection from his superiors, and the forces of law, and does not receive it. Ceppos initially defended Webb, and reportedly showed up at an in-house party wearing a military helmet. 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. His corpse was discovered on the seventh anniversary of his resignation from the Mercury News. 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." "As a PhD student, McCoy went to Vietnam and built an absolutely damning case about the CIA's involvement with trafficking heroin. Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein also took note and wrote to CIA director John Deutch and Attorney General Janet Reno, asking for investigations into the articles' allegations. But, Ceppos wrote, the series "did not meet our standards" in four areas. 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. After introducing the three, the first article discussed primarily Blandn and Meneses, and their relationship with the Contras and the CIA. On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Gary Stephen Webb, Pulitzer prize-winning US investigative journalist, typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; he laid out a certificate for his cremation; he taped a note on the door telling movers - who were coming the next morning to move him out of his rental house near Sacramento - to When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandn. 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. When he told me, I said it sounded crazy. (Strawser) Webb. "Report on Alleged Involvement: Findings" 43. 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. [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. By the time Webb began researching Dark Alliance, Bell was 38 and they had three children. The first one, "The California Story," was issued in a classified version on December 17, 1997, and in an unclassified version on January 29, 1998. . [69], Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? Save 50% with early-bird passes. 4) The series "created impressions that were open to misinterpretation" through "imprecise language and graphics. It would have been our 25th wedding anniversary," Bell recalls. "To get back at his editors?". 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. Gary's documentation is awesome and his work ethic is unbelievable. 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. "He had six in a short period of time." GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. His. By this stage, he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. .article-native-ad svg { Gary's story, however, is far from over and could never be killed by something as trivial as a material bullet. '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. margin-top: 10px; Celebrezze eventually sued the Plain Dealer and won an undisclosed out of court settlement. Webb's research took a year, in the course of which he received death threats. [59], The first volume of the report found no evidence that "any past or present employee of CIA, or anyone acting on behalf of CIA, had any direct or indirect dealing" with Ross, Blandn, or Meneses or that any of the other figures mentioned in "Dark Alliance" were ever employed by or associated with or contacted by the agency. He wrote that the series likely "oversimplified" the crack epidemic in America and the supposed "critical role" the dealers written about in the series played in it. But ultimately, the responsibility was, and is, mine.". "The second bullet," adds Bell, who has worked for more than 20 years in the area of respiratory therapy, "struck his carotid artery. Gary Webb was born in Corona, California, in 1955. padding-left: 10px!important; The whole business, I suggested to Blum, has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot. 71K views 8 years ago Gary Webb's son Ian talks about the film in which Jeremy Renner plays his late journalist father. This drug ring "opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles" and, as a result, "The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America."[23]. 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. His victory in the event last year gave him . But Webb had one huge blind side: He was fundamentally a man of passion, not of fairness. "[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." Both sides were left angry and disappointed. ", Webb had already been cremated and his ashes scattered in the bay off Santa Cruz two weeks before. After the announcement of federal investigations into the claims made in the series, other newspapers began investigating, and several papers published articles suggesting the series' claims were overstated. He also defended the series in interviews with all three papers. 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. 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. He was laid off in February 2004 when Assembly Member Fabian Nez was elected Speaker. Like the CIA and Justice Department reports, it also found that neither Blandn, Meneses, nor Ross were associated with the CIA. Contemporary discussions of the series are discussed in the section on, Webb 2011, "Caltrans Ignored Elevated Freeway Safety. 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. As it turned out," she adds, "that was not their intent.". Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Webb took a modestly paid, low-profile job as an investigator with the California State Legislature. [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. When Webb's body was discovered last December, Bell says, this last item had been dumped in the trash. 3) The series oversimplified how the crack epidemic grew. "I'd get discouraged," she said, "but I never really gave up hope." Back in 1997, SN&R brought the controversy about Gary Webb to readers with "Secrets and Lies," a cover story about why the mainstream media attacked . "[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." According to Walt Bogdanich, a former colleague on the Plain Dealer who has won two Pulitzers and now works for The New York Times, Webb was the best retriever of information from public records he has ever seen. Relationships with other women ended badly. Ceppos and Garcia have long since lost any taste for public discussion of "Dark Alliance". His career ended, his livelihood was destroyed and certain games were started to be . One of his last articles examined America's Army, a video game designed by the U.S. Although it did find that both men were major drug dealers, "guilty of enriching themselves at the expense of countless drug users," and that they had contributed money to the Contra cause, "we did not find that their activities were responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles, much less the rise of crack throughout the nation, or that they were a significant source of support for the Contras. Cooper and Mariah were engaged before they finally tied the knot. [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. 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. Webb was born in Corona, California. On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; laid out a certificate for his cremation; and taped a note on the door telling movers, who were . She was a homemaker and a member of Hunters Chapel Baptist Church. 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. "He told me, not long before he died, that he didn't want to get up in the mornings," she says. The film broadened the debate which led to the decriminalisation of . ", She pauses: "That said, he did sleep with a gun under his bed.". 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 - whose article had never alleged that the CIA deliberately targeted any ethnic group - became a national celebrity. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. But they underestimated the paradigm shifting power of the internet, and the intelligence of Webb, who not only listed the explosive story online . By a fortunate coincidence of timing, the report was released on a day when the Monica Lewinsky scandal dominated every front page in the country. "[72] California Representative Maxine Waters, who was Webb's strongest supporter in Congress after the "Dark Alliance" controversy broke, issued a statement after Webb's death calling him "one of the finest investigative journalists that our country has ever seen. 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 . Carey ultimately decided that there were problems with several parts of the story and wrote a draft article incorporating his findings. He died by suicide on December 10, 2004. He was previously married to Sue Bell. Investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of stories in 1996 for the San Jose Mercury News that documented the US-government-backed Contra insurgents' drug pipeline into Los Angeles. He received his medical degree from American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine and has been in practice for more than. An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. He crashed and shredded his clothes, face and body on a barbed-wire fence." I felt weak and distressed; the whole thing was so fresh. For two years, Blum and Kerry supervised the interrogation of dozens of witnesses who described CIA-related drug deals in central America. 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". Within weeks, the site was attracting up to 1.3m hits per day. Gary Webb sums up the story in his last major interview just days before his death. "I told Gary not to go near this story," his source replies, in an emotional voice. The article resulted in a lawsuit against Webb's paper which the plaintiffs won. Video courtesy of documentary FREEWAY: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM premiering on Al Jazeera America in early 2015. A 1985 series, "Doctoring the Truth," uncovered problems in the State Medical Board[12] and led to an Ohio House investigation which resulted in major revisions to the state Medical Practice Act. Gary Stephen Webb (August 31, 1955 December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist. In 1997 Ceppos was awarded the US Society of Professional Journalists' National Ethics Award. 2) The series's estimate of the money involved was presented as fact instead of as an estimate. "Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. If the antagonism of competing publications was predictable, what happened to Webb within his own newspaper was not. ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". "Do not quote me. On the last day Webb was alive, his motorbike broke down while he was moving to his mother's house. They failed because the climate was more sceptical then. The first shot went through his face, and exited at his left cheek. ". It found that "the allegations contained in the original Mercury News articles were exaggerations of the actual facts." Webb may indeed be physically dead, but his research is more alive today than ever before, and continues to haunt the shadow government and snowball into a monster that will undoubtedly have its eventual revenge. "Gary was given the choice of relocating either to San Jose," says Bell, "or to Cupertino". "[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. "If I had one dream for you," he wrote, "it was that you would go into journalism and carry on the kind of work I did - fighting, with all your might, the oppression and bigotry and stupidity and greed that surrounds us. "I think Kerry learnt a lesson from all this," reporter Robert Parry says. He made that very clear. Leen, who covered the cocaine trade for the Miami Herald in the 1980s, rejects the claim that "because the report uncovered an agency mindset of indifference to drug-smuggling allegations", it vindicated Webb's reporting. [71] "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. [55] Webb eventually chose Cupertino, but was unhappy with the routine stories he was reporting there and the long commute. A jury awarded the plaintiffs over 13 million dollars and the case was later settled. "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". Army. He said: 'No. The Los Angeles Times and other major papers published articles suggesting the "Dark Alliance" claims were overstated and, in November 1996, Jerome Ceppos, the executive editor at Mercury News, wrote about being "in the eye of the storm". After Webb's death, a collection of his stories from before and after the "Dark Alliance" series was published. And when he got something in his head, he was determined to do it. GARY WEBB was an investigative reporter who focused on government and private sector corruption and who won more than thirty journalism awards. [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. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California." } [35] The second article, by McManus, was the longest of the series and dealt with the role of the Contras in the drug trade and CIA knowledge of drug activities by the Contras. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff". He leaves behind the love of his life and adoring wife of 41 years, Anne Michelle Phillips. 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. The character reporter Irene Abe is said by fans of the show to be a stand in character for the real life Gary Webb. This is why Webb's "Dark Alliance" series is an essential source, a primary text that every journalism student should study. Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA. 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. [65], After leaving The Mercury News, Webb worked as an investigator for the California State Legislature. The series ran from October 2022, 1996, and was researched by a team of 17 reporters. The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. "I am scared," the voice replies. He was born June 18, 1943, in Appleton, son of the late Wilford and Helen (Hauskey) Webb. According to Bell, Webb had been unhappy for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper. [46] Overholser was harshly critical of the series, "reported by a seemingly hotheaded fellow willing to have people leap to conclusions his reporting couldn't back up." "People told me that," she says. Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails. Gillis Poll Muttontown,
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