Webb, Gary (1955–2004)

Gary Webb was an investigative journalist who wrote a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 on connections between the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S.-backed Contra army seeking to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist government, and cocaine trafficking into the United States. The series, which was placed online with a number of supporting documents when the Internet was still in its relative infancy, sparked a public and congressional furor that led to CIA and Department of Justice investigations of the newspaper's charges.

Webb won dozens of journalism awards while reporting early in his career for the Kentucky Post and, from 1983 through 1988, the Plain Dealer (Cleveland), but it was at the Mercury News, where he worked from 1988 through 1997, that he developed a national public profile. His famous investigative series, Dark Alliance, alleged that the CIA turned a blind eye to the cocaine trafficking of the Contra army it created and supported. This drug smuggling into the United States, according to Webb, helped to fuel the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Webb focused in particular on a West Coast ring led by Oscar Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses that sold cocaine to “Freeway” Ricky Donnell Ross, who distributed crack through the Crips and Bloods street gangs in South Central Los Angeles. The profits from this imported cocaine, Webb reported, were used to finance the Contra forces attacking the Sandinista government [Page 1456]in Nicaragua. According to Webb, the CIA squelched efforts by American law enforcement agents to investigate and prosecute the drug traffickers. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, called the affair “one of the worst official abuses in our nation's history.”

The response to Webb's series was impassioned. The CIA forcefully denied the charges. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, all of which had ignored or downplayed evidence of CIA complicity in the drug trade for years, attacked the series, at times on the basis of claims Webb did not actually make. The Mercury News, which at first defended Webb's reporting, ultimately retreated. In a front-page column, the paper's executive editor, Jerry Ceppos, claimed that the series fell short of his standards. Webb vigorously defended himself, however. Following the attack by the national press outlets, Webb was relocated to the Mercury News's Cupertino bureau, which was considered a humiliating demotion. He resigned from the paper shortly afterward, accepting a position as an investigator for the California state legislature.

In 1998, the inspector general of the CIA, Frederick Hitz, released two reports that largely confirmed Webb's findings. Despite this seeming vindication, however, Webb remained unable to find work at another daily newspaper, and his proposal to expand his investigative series into a book was rejected by more than two dozen publishers. Dark Alliance was eventually published as a book by Seven Stories Press in 1998.

Webb briefly returned to journalism in 2004 as a reporter for the weekly Sacramento News & Review, where he wrote a handful of stories. On December 10, 2004, after a long bout of depression, he died of a gunshot wound to the head, an apparent suicide.

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