It also examined "how CIA handled and responded to information regarding allegations of drug trafficking" by people involved in Contra activities or support. Almost. Managed by: Pam Wilson (may be slow to respond) Last Updated: Webb became a staff reporter for the San Jose Mercury News in 1988. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. Noting that most of the activities discussed in the report had nothing to do with the people Webb reported on, Kornbluh told Schou, "I can't say it's a vindication. [13] Webb then moved to the paper's statehouse bureau, where he covered statewide issues and won numerous regional journalism awards. Gary Webb famously died of two gun shot wounds to the head and his death that was ruled a suicide, is the common sense notion that this was clearly assassination true? Irene's character a reminder of an old controversy about Gary Webb. When he was engaged, he worked hard. Parry, the first reporter to write about the US authorities' drug-running on behalf of the Contras, had survived a campaign by the White House to discredit first his story, then his reputation. Instead, he found work in 1978 as a reporter at the Kentucky Post, a local paper affiliated with the larger Cincinnati Post. 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. "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. Hired by the San Jose Mercury News, Webb contributed to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. The mainstream press, now known as the legacy. Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . And the importance of exposing them. The character reporter Irene Abe is said by fans of the show to be a stand in character for the real life Gary Webb. Price placed Webb as the shooter. "It was the worst day of my life." 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. 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. I ask Bell. Webb's condition exacerbated his natural recklessness. The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. 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. [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. But Webb And this is not a happy story - or," she adds, "a little one.". [60], The House Intelligence Committee issued its report in February 2000. [18], Webb began researching "Dark Alliance" in July 1995. He had sold his house the week before his death because he was unable to afford the mortgage. 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 Blandn, was covertly selling tons of cocaine for the Central Intelligence Agency in South Central Los Angeles, and other parts of the country. 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. "The first story he had to file was about a police horse which had died of constipation.". "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". He was previously married to Sue Bell. "Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. He died by suicide on December 10, 2004. His series of articles - which prompted the distinguished reporter and former Newsweek Washington correspondent Robert Parry to describe Webb as "an American hero" - incited fury among the African-American community, many of whom took his investigation as proof that the White House saw crack as a way of bringing genocide to the ghetto. [15], In 1988, Webb was recruited by the San Jose Mercury News, which was looking for an investigative reporter. "The cause of death was determined to be self . He accepted Christ at an early age. [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." Webb is best known for his "Dark Alliance" series, which appeared in The Mercury News in 1996. They failed because the climate was more sceptical then. The normal process is, or should be, that a reporter files a story and is robustly challenged by his paper's lawyers and editors - who, if satisfied that the report is accurate - publish, then defend the writer to the hilt. ", The report called several of its findings "troubling." 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." She kept crying about how terrible it all was - by which I mean that she was, physically, crying. The consensus, insofar as one exists, is that he probably overstated both the amount of drug money made by Ross and Blandn, and the percentage of those profits diverted to the Contras. Pictured as a teenage fan: Gary Numan with Gemma, his now wife, getting his autograph in 1985 years before they got together Gary was 600,000 in debt, and on the verge of going under in. 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. '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. Webb took a modestly paid, low-profile job as an investigator with the California State Legislature. 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. 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. As a result, some major US newspapers ignored its findings completely, while others relegated a brief summary to their inside pages. 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. On December 10th, 2004 Gary Webb was found dead of two (allegedly self-inflicted) gunshots to the head. He had a tight circle that included almost no one from the Mercury News, says his former wife, Susan Bell, and a sensitive side he rarely showed outside the bounds of his close friends and family. "Do not quote me. On one road trip, in 2001, he came off the motorcycle and split his helmet open. [52] Webb was allowed to keep working on the story and made one more trip to Nicaragua in March. He also defended the series in interviews with all three papers. ". "Gary was 18 and I was 16 when we first met and started dating in Indianapolis," said Sue Stokes. The follow-up reporting in the Los Angeles Times and other papers has been criticised for focusing on problems in the series rather than re-examining the earlier CIA-Contra claims. 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. 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. [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. The series. Gary Webb's son Ian talks about the film in which Jeremy Renner plays his late journalist father. 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. One of his last articles examined America's Army, a video game designed by the U.S. He then transferred to nearby Northern Kentucky University. "You sound very scared," Moreira remarks. Relationships with other women ended badly. 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. Survivors include his wife, Karla Webb; their children, Kimberly Ware and husband, Kyle, Laci Higgins and husband, Wesley, Kenna Logan and Heath Webb and . He was born in Jacksonville, Texas, on March 13, 1954, to Carroll and Waldine Webb, the younger brother of Diane Webb. The attack on Gary Webb and his series in the San Jose Mercury News remains one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist's competence in living memory. "Gary Webb was left to fend for himself. "It was like someone had made a terrible noise, or a terrible smell, in a small room," recalls Jonathan Winer, Kerry's chief senate staff investigator . He was born in Hammersmith, London. WEBB, Mr. Gary Lee, our beloved son, husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle went home with his heavenly Father Monday, August 29, 2011 at University of Michigan Hospital. The story they printed was just awful. When Gary originally broke this mind blowing story, the arrogant authority's assumed they could simply ignore him and hope he'd go away. 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. [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". [33] Golden also referred to the controversy over Webb's contacts with Ross's lawyer. Celebrezze eventually sued the Plain Dealer and won an undisclosed out of court settlement. E&P Staff. Few reporters I've known could match his nose for an investigative story. [8] In 1979, Webb married Susan Bell; the couple eventually had three children. [73], On the other hand, many of the writers and editors who worked with him have had high praise for him. "He started having motorcycle crashes," Bell says. Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. Such a case normally would have sparked little notice. Army. "But Gary thought that if something was true, it should be told. Nick Schou, a journalist who wrote a 2006 biography of Webb, has claimed that this was the most important error in the series. 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. According to the report, the Inspector-General's office (OIG) examined all information the agency had "relating to CIA knowledge of drug trafficking allegations in regard to any person directly or indirectly involved in Contra activities." The article discussed Webb's contacts with Ross's attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross's defense had used Webb's series. "Like enjoy it.". 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. 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. There was no coffin, casket or tombstone. 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. When they married, she was aged just 21. In interviews after leaving The Mercury News, Webb described the 1997 controversy as media manipulation. "[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." When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandn. He was taken to hospital by air ambulance. 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. Webb - whose article had never alleged that the CIA deliberately targeted any ethnic group - became a national celebrity. Some editors regarded him as stubborn to the point of insolence. The first shot went through his face, and exited at his left cheek. Blandn and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. In 1997 Ceppos was awarded the US Society of Professional Journalists' National Ethics Award. 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. Meneses, an established smuggler and a Contra supporter as well, taught Blandn how to smuggle and provided him with cocaine. He wrote well. He also stated "the series presented dangerous ideas" by suggesting "crimes of state had been committed" (i.e. This emotive last phrase refers to Webb's experience in the immediate aftermath of publication of his three lengthy articles, in the summer of 1996. In city after city, local dealers either bought from Ross or got left behind."[24]. There were no offers. He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards, and building a strong reputation for investigative writing. 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