Five years ago, a tragedy occurred in American journalism: Investigative reporter Gary Webb - who had been ostracized by his own colleagues for forcing a spotlight back onto an ugly government scandal they wanted to ignore - was driven to commit suicide. Gary Webb Resigns from the San Jose Mercury News 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. "Look at what happened to Gary Webb. [60], The House Intelligence Committee issued its report in February 2000. Gary Webb : Murdered For Exposing The Truth - Educate Inspire Change GARY WEBB: His wife's office was burglarized. Webb's experience came as no surprise to Jack Blum, senior prosecutor for the Kerry Committee. 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. 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. 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." . Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. It was an amazing scoop - but one that would ruin his career and drive him to suicide. "[38], Surprised by The Washington Post article, The Mercury News's executive editor Jerome Ceppos wrote to the Post defending the series. One article, dealing mostly with the response of the Los Angeles Black community to the stories, described the series's evidence as "thin". This did not happen in Webb's case. The new movie Kill the Messenger, based in part on a 2006 book by a former student of mine, eulogizes Webb . "I think the behaviour of the media in all of this has been amazing," says Bell. "He walked in one day," Bell recalls, "and said, 'You are not going to believe what I just found out.' 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. 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. His death was ruled a suicide by the Sacramento County coroner's office. The CIA, the drug dealers, and the tragedy of Gary Webb - The Telegraph The review was conducted primarily by editor Jonathan Krim and reporter Pete Carey, who had written the paper's first published analysis of the series. He crashed and shredded his clothes, face and body on a barbed-wire fence." Webb worked for several newspapers including The Kentucky Post and Cleveland Plain Dealer. 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. Tomac is used to good feelings when it comes to Daytona. After the series's publication, the Northern California branch of the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996. He became an investigator for the California State Legislature, published a book based on the "Dark Alliance" series in 1998, and did freelance investigative reporting. [61] According to the report, it used Webb's reporting and writing as "key resources in focusing and refining the investigation." Ceppos failed to reply to one phone message and six emails. In February, Gary Webb gave his ex-wife. GARY WEBB was an investigative reporter who focused on government and private sector corruption and who won more than thirty journalism awards. It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? 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." An investigative journalist, Webb became interested in the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. "[82], Kill the Messenger (2014) is based on Webb's book Dark Alliance and Nick Schou's biography of Webb. The first shot went through his face, and exited at his left cheek. Ross, currently serving life, was already infamous; he had been profiled in the LA Times in December 1994, by writer Jesse Katz, at a time when Ross was at liberty and in penitent mood. font-size: 34px; Do something else with your life," the voice urges. Save 50% with early-bird passes. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. "[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. E&P Staff. 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. Sheriff: Fatal Blue Grass house fire rule 'undetermined, but accidental' Gary Stephen Webb was a Pulitzer prize winning American investigative reporter who exposed cocaine trafficking by the CIA.He wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, which initially backed his articles but later dropped him.Webb was put under pressure most certainly from the CIA under John Deutch for his reporting. . 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. When Ross discovered the market for crack in Los Angeles, he began buying cocaine from Blandn. 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. Garry Webb wrote the 1996 "Dark Alliance" series for the San Jose. 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". 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. Webb's then-wife Sue remembers coming home from the shops and finding her. His corpse was discovered on the seventh anniversary of his resignation from the Mercury News. Few reporters I've known could match his nose for an investigative story. "People told me that," she says. To Read the Full Story Become an Adweek+ Subscriber. Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns? padding-bottom: 20px; "[64] Webb's longest response to the controversy was in "The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On," a chapter he contributed to an anthology of press criticism: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}, If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The passing of Gary ends more than 50 years with his best friend and loving wife, Marilyn J. 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. Webb's corpse was found in the bedroom, with two gunshot wounds to the head. "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 Central America", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gary_Webb&oldid=1138520387, This page was last edited on 10 February 2023, at 03:36. 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. Webb, unlike Blum or Kerry, had to face his difficulties alone. padding-left: 10px!important; 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." Age 43 years. It also examined "how CIA handled and responded to information regarding allegations of drug trafficking" by people involved in Contra activities or support. At the end of March, Ceppos told Webb that he was going to present the internal review findings in a column. His victory in the event last year gave him . Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? [49], The paper also gave Webb permission to visit Central America again to get more evidence supporting the story. The story was picked up by black talk-radio stations. 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." If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as The New York Times saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA. In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los Angeles drug dealers. "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 . To pay off his mounting debts, Webb sold the Carmichael property, where he was living alone, and arranged to move in with his mother. 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 was sleeping more, he hated to get up in the morning, he started having a lot of motorcycle. Webb's ex-wife, Stokes, now remarried and still living in Sacramento, had heard it all before, too. ", She pauses: "That said, he did sleep with a gun under his bed.". By 1997, Bell tells me, Webb - whose 30-year career had earned him more awards than there is room for in her study - had been reassigned to the Mercury News's office in Cupertino. 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. ", Many of these are in the series archive at. He was assigned to its Sacramento bureau, where he was allowed to choose most of his own stories. 2) The series's estimate of the money involved was presented as fact instead of as an estimate. The whole business, I suggested to Blum, has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot. By Sam Stanton Bee Staff Writer Published 2:15 am PST Wednesday, December 15, 2004. . "[77], Webb's reporting in "Dark Alliance" remains controversial. 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. .article-native-ad strong { Can these things possibly be? [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. ", "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. But as his ex-wife told the . "I told Gary not to go near this story," his source replies, in an emotional voice. The article discussed Webb's contacts with Ross's attorney and prosecution complaints of how Ross's defense had used Webb's series. Gary Numan's superfan wife had 'body lift' and exploding breasts Gary's ex-wife Susan Bell states: "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide." An interesting OPINION, but she supplies no convincing evidence to illustrate what she means by this. Voices: The Gary Webb saga still has lessons today "The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post", he stated. Webb moved his wife and two young children to a suburb and continued a tradition he had started in Cleveland, restoring their small house with the help of how-to books, installing wainscoting and custom tile, new cabinets and gardens, while putting in overtime at the paper. Gary Webb - Wikipedia He was sentenced to life in prison, though the sentence was shortened on appeal and Ross was released in 2009. Within weeks, the site was attracting up to 1.3m hits per day. reports. 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 . "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 . Family (1) Gary Webb's income source is mostly from being a successful . Despite some hyped phrasing, "Dark Alliance" appears to be praiseworthy investigative reporting."[47]. The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors. Am J Mens Health, 2018 Mar 1:1557988318758788. doi: 10.1177/1557988318758788. This support "was not directed by anyone within the Contra movement who had an association with the CIA," and the Committee found "no evidence that the CIA or the Intelligence Community was aware of these individuals support. Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA. Gary Webb photos on Flickr | Flickr In August of 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb broke the biggest story of his life. 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. [3], Webb was born in Corona, California. Working in San Jose would have meant daily contact with what Bell describes as "people he did not want to be with". 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. 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. By the late spring of 1996, Webb was ready to publish. Gary is survived by his wife of 48 years, Beverly Webb; children Margaret . Then, on 10 December, he resigned. 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? George Webb and Paul Cottrell have begun a weekly series on CoronaVirus now, Mondays at 5PM, EST on paul Cottrell's Rumble Channel. When his medical insurance expired, he stopped taking his antidepressants. 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." The story had little immediate impact. 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. [71] "The way he was acting it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said. The CIA Inspector General's report, commissioned in response to the allegations in "Dark Alliance", was published in the autumn of 1998. In the final few months of his life, Bell says, Webb became increasingly withdrawn. [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." } 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 second article described Blandn's background and how he began smuggling cocaine to support the Contras. The collection, The Killing Game: Selected Stories from the Author of Dark Alliance, was edited by Webb's son, Eric. But the biggest loss he had was the writing. His own paper, the Mercury News, criticized the series in 1997 without providing many specifics. . We are in the living room of Bell's house just outside Sacramento, California. Talking about his wife, Mariah Webb is a nurse who also educates about essential products . Gary Webb's family says his death was Suicide. It was good that his story forced those reports to come out, but part of what made that happen was based on misleading information. 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. Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. Cooper and Mariah were engaged before they finally tied the knot. Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb How Kill the Messenger Will Vindicate Investigative Journalist Gary Webb Melinda Welsh September 29, 2014 This one has all the ingredients of a dreamed-up Hollywood. We're well aware that they/it (the cia) did do it. Dr. Gary A. Webb, MD | Marco Island, FL | Geriatrician | US News Doctors 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. *, '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. "[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." A jury awarded the plaintiffs over 13 million dollars and the case was later settled. And this is not a happy story - or," she adds, "a little one.". It would have been our 25th wedding anniversary," Bell recalls. After the publication of "Dark Alliance," The Mercury News continued to pursue the story, publishing follow-ups to the original series for the next three months. Dr. Gary A. Webb is a geriatrician in Marco Island, Florida. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst with the George Washington University's National Security Archive, was one of the first to suggest that Webb had overplayed his hand in the Mercury News version of "Dark Alliance". [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.
Georgia Tech Mgt 6203 Syllabus,
Atlanta Botanical Gardens Donation Request,
Brother's Bond Bourbon Signing,
Radiology Rvu Table 2020,
Articles G
