"Which was that, if he wanted a future within the political establishment of the United States, then he should concentrate on other aspects of life.". And the importance of exposing them. 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. 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. "He had six in a short period of time." And then, who knows if he was unconscious and woke up or he was awake, but he adjusted and then finished the job." ", As Webb would tell a friend, after he had been ostracised: "You have to look out, when the big dog gets off the porch.". "If you were going to kill Gary Webb, you would have killed him five years before he died. In and out of work, he had a reputation for taking risks. . So, on Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb 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 instead call 911. The legendary civil-rights activist Dick Gregory was arrested while he protested outside the CIA's headquarters; Gregory began referring to the organisation as "Crack in America". "He told the guys with him he was fine," she recalls, "got back on the bike, then passed out, half an hour later. He cites the case of Alfred McCoy, now Professor of South East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin. One time he called me and he said: 'I have this plan that will benefit us both.' Webb followed up Baca's leads at the California State Library, examining Congressional records and FBI reports. about a link between the CIA and crack The videos below shed more light on the Kill the Messenger true story. Going to the CIA to ask if they've ever profited from drug sales in Los Angeles, I suggested to Kornbluh, is rather like asking Fagin if he has ever picked a pocket. But you say - dear God. He became known for his 1996 Dark Alliance publication that alleged that the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles, Califonia was aided by members of the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua and supported and protected by the Central Intelligence Agency and United States government.. Webb's Dark Alliance series gained notable … Should these editors subsequently deem the story to have been fatally flawed, they take the consequences. {{#verifyErrors}} {{message}} {{/verifyErrors}} {{^verifyErrors}} {{message}} {{/verifyErrors}}. 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". 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. When I first heard the news, I tell Bell, I was inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that still proliferate on the internet, suggesting that Webb had been assassinated - either by one of the drug dealers he'd met while writing Dark Alliance, or by the intelligence services who were supposed to police them. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? San Jose Mercury News, which at "It sounds crazy," says Bell, "but having his motorbike stolen was the last straw. 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 … Susan Bell: a shameful secret history In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los Angeles drug dealers. 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. Originally shared by Guerrilla News Network on archive.org. There was no coffin, casket or tombstone. In the midst of a bout of depression, Gary Webb, 49, was found dead in his home on December 10, 2004. The real Gary Webb talks about his 1996 Gary Webb is dead. "I told Gary not to go near this story," his source replies, in an emotional voice. Relationships with other women ended badly. Ceppos and Garcia have long since lost any taste for public discussion of "Dark Alliance". Yes. At the commemorative service for Webb, held at the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento, Bell read out the letter Webb had written to his son Eric, now 17. The media had contorted Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" article, accusing Webb of making allegations that were nowhere to be found in his piece. He had a bad, poorly oiled, old revolver and he slipped the first time. cocaine, accusing the organization of Video courtesy of documentary FREEWAY: CRACK IN THE SYSTEM premiering on Al Jazeera America in early 2015. ", 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. first supported him, then turned against David's mother, Betty, was an alcoholic and his father, Rupert, was a habitual criminal and pedophile. * The agency's response was to try to prevent him from getting his doctorate, then block his advancement in the academic world. He typed out four lengthy suicide notes and put them in the mail to family members. Nobody who heads a government agency can let such an allegation stand.". As it turned out," she adds, "that was not their intent.". It was just more than he could take.". The son of Wayne S. Webb and Ruth May Mars Webb, he was born November 26, 1946 in Blanchard, Oklahoma. When they married, she was aged just 21. A passing motorist - a heavily tattooed young man - gave him a lift home, then returned and stole the motorcycle, which police recovered from him three days after Webb's death. The passing of Gary ends more than 50 years with his best friend and loving wife, Marilyn J. Webb drew a line from the drug boss Ricky Ross to the contras, writing, "The cash Ross paid for the cocaine, court records show, was then used to buy weapons and equipment for a guerrilla army named the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense," or the FDN. "He walked in one day," Bell recalls, "and said, 'You are not going to believe what I just found out.' ", Read our full mailing list consent terms here. "Look at what happened to Gary Webb. "People told me that," she says. "I think Kerry learnt a lesson from all this," reporter Robert Parry says. So he blew her off. He went into the bedroom, and picked up a .38 that had belonged to his father. He resigned from the San Jose Mercury News after spending several months at the new location (LATimes.com). Gary Webb, friends say, was a far more combative character than either the Mercury News's executive editor Ceppos or page editor Garcia. "Dark Alliance" was the first significant attempt to document a connection between the CIA's anti-communism efforts and drug trafficking in Central America. I'm glad that I didn't dissuade him, because it was important to get the truth out... but for Gary Webb, there was a very high price to pay." By Richard Horgan. "Like enjoy it.". By the autumn of 1997, on medication for clinical depression, he was given leave of absence from the paper. After a local paper reported that he 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. Yes, but it didn't have anything to do with his "Dark Alliance" story. An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. Our research into the Kill the Messenger true story reveals that the real Gary Webb's three-part series called "Dark Alliance" was published in August 1996 by the San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper that employed him. In the final few months of his life, Bell says, Webb became increasingly withdrawn. His corpse was discovered on the seventh anniversary of his resignation from the Mercury News. Dark Alliance Interviews & the Kill the Messenger Trailer, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, Official Website of Drug Boss "Freeway" Rick Ross. "Gary didn't take her seriously," says Susan Bell, "because he was always getting calls alleging weird stuff about the CIA. 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. That's survivable. Gary Webb, in his own words. He was married to Sue Bell. Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA as Gary Stephen Webb. him. He made that very clear. According to Webb, CIA-backed Nicaraguan guerrillas were funding their war by selling drugs in the U.S. — but the CIA did nothing to stop it. There are no indications that this seemingly ordinary human being carries with him an extraordinary message. Webb profiled the relationship in his 1996 three-part article "Dark Alliance," where he showed that the Nicaraguans had CIA connections. Webb’s death on the night of Dec. 9, 2004, came as the U.S. press corps was at a nadir, … TIL Gary Webb, the reporter from the San Jose Mercury News who first broke the story of CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, was found dead with "two gunshot wounds to the head." Former drug kingpin "Freeway" Ricky Ross "Looking back," she says, "I think Gary had been obsessed with suicide for some time. Webb joined the Mercury News in 1988, via the Cleveland Plain Dealer. On the last day Webb was alive, his motorbike broke down while he was moving to his mother's house. We had been here before." Work with a bunch of drug dealers to run guns? He said: 'No. Webb had become, as somebody put it, "radioactive". He crashed and shredded his clothes, face and body on a barbed-wire fence." She kept crying about how terrible it all was - by which I mean that she was, physically, crying. Shortly before his death, his motorcycle had been stolen (it was recovered by his family after his death). Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. By the time Webb began researching Dark Alliance, Bell was 38 and they had three children. His death was ruled a suicideby the Sacramento County coroner's office. The staff of the San Jose Mercury News won a Pulitzer Prize "for its detailed coverage of the October 17, 1989, Bay Area earthquake and its aftermath" (Pulitzer.org). He was instead banished to a remote bureau in Cupertino, California where he wrote obituaries. "He lost his spark" (Cleveland.com). He's nervous. "You do not understand the power of these people," he adds, referring to the US intelligence services. "This is an appalling charge," says a tense-looking Deutch. 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. 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. No. He talks about Some editors regarded him as stubborn to the point of insolence. Baca, portrayed by Paz Vega in the movie, phoned Webb and wanted him to write about how the government had framed her boyfriend on bogus charges. Webb focused on the Los Angeles-based drug kingpin "Freeway" Ricky Ross, portrayed by Michael Kenneth Williams in the movie. He stayed home, playing computer games, and began smoking cannabis heavily. Gary Webb was … Ceppos initially defended Webb, and reportedly showed up at an in-house party wearing a military helmet. The CIA Inspector General's report, commissioned in response to the allegations in "Dark Alliance", was published in the autumn of 1998. 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. Thank you." "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. Webb chose the second option. When she got indignant," she adds, "he went to meet her.". We were dismissed as a bunch of nuts." Part of the San Jose Mercury team that won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for reporting over the Loma Prieta earthquake. "But that doesn't mean he was wrong, and it certainly doesn't mean he deserved what he got." By this stage, he was prepared to work as a jobbing reporter. 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." "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. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. 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 coming the next morning, to instead call 911. In February last year he was laid off by the State Legislature. 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. Gary and Karla James Webb married and blended their families on January 7, 1989 in O’Donnell, Texas. story of Gary Webb, a journalist who wrote "And to an extent, they succeeded.". Although Blandón'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. By Sam Stanton -- Bee Staff Writer Facing a barrage of calls from the media and the public, the Sacramento County Coroner's Office issued a statement Tuesday confirming that former investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide with two gunshots to the head. Webb profiled the relationship in his 1996 three-part article "Dark Alliance," where he showed that the Nicaraguans had CIA connections. 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. Then, in August the same year, the first of three instalments of "Dark Alliance" appeared. traffickers, pointing out that the U.S. Exposed CIA Nicaragua/drugs angle. "He thought I was being cowardly. fund the rebels. They failed because the climate was more sceptical then. 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. The trigger slips. And it was ignored by the US media, for all of those reasons. The government labeled Webb a whack job. That was just the way he was.". 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. -LATimes.com, Yes. He was a writer, known for Kill the Messenger (2014), Filming in Georgia (2015) and Crack in America (2015). 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. Webb discusses the The whole business, I suggested to Blum, has echoes of a classic Alfred Hitchcock plot. When it did, beginning with The Washington Post, it shocked Webb's critics as much as his many admirers. Gary Webb was born on August 31, 1955 in Corona, California, USA as Gary Stephen Webb. Webb, according to Bell, was a man who, more than most, found that his mood and self-esteem fluctuated in accordance with his professional fortunes. "Back then. "I feel like it depicts him very well," says son Ian Webb. He was a member of the -LATimes.com After bearing the brunt of the attacks, his own newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, distanced itself from his article and published an apology letter to its readers. If the antagonism of competing publications was predictable, what happened to Webb within his own newspaper was not. "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". The drugs went to South Central LA. It is with deep sadness that we announce Gary Webb passed to his heavenly home on Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2019, in Greensboro, N.C., at the age of 57. -NYTimes.com, Yes. Together with my wife Lee, I have owned Breckland Boiler Services since 1992 and operate throughout Breckland, South Norfolk and North Suffolk. Webb's article purported that the crack cocaine epidemic that exploded in the 1980s was partially due to the CIA ignoring the drug trafficking being undertaken by the rebels it was supporting. "He definitely was depressed. Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orien. dealing operation and how he managed so She said the paper wanted to make up for what it had done in the past. The response from the American press took two months to arrive. WEBB, Gary Bruce It is with great sadness and much love that we announce the passing of Gary Bruce Webb, on September 22, 2020 at the age of 81. Gary Webb sums up the story in his last major interview just days before his death. Gary Webb's wife, Sue Webb (now Sue Stokes), said that he had been depressed for years due to his inability to get hired at a daily newspaper. "But Gary thought that if something was true, it should be told. Do not quote me on anything.". -NYTimes.com Major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, also set out to debunk a claim that Webb had never actually made -- that the crack epidemic was deliberately unleashed on black America by the CIA. When his medical insurance expired, he stopped taking his antidepressants. -The Independent. His death, in 2004, was ruled a suicide. Ian Webb is portrayed by actor Lucas Hedges in the Kill the Messenger movie. There were no offers. "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 . I realise now he was thinking about suicide.". This did not happen in Webb's case. He ends up going down and shooting through his jaw. current legit businesses that he has What he found, he wrote later, "nearly knocked me off my chair". A suicide note was also found at the scene. Gary Webb was a Virgo and was born in the Baby Boomers Generation. Gary Wayne Webb, 73, of Blanchard, died Monday, July 20, 2020, in Anadarko. There are no indications that this seemingly ordinary human being carries with him an extraordinary message. "Let me be frank about what we are finding," Hitz said. turning a blind eye to the cocaine coming 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. Gary Webb was born on March 21, 1959 to Wayne and Peggy Davie Webb in Lamesa, Texas. 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. Childhood. story "Dark Alliance," which criticizes The first effect of the onslaught was to ease the pressure on the CIA. Proponents of Webb claimed that the bigger rival newspapers were simply upset that they had been scooped by a much smaller outfit. Webb was found dead in his Carmichael home on December 10, 2004, with two gunshot wounds to the head. We are in the living room of Bell's house just outside Sacramento, California. 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. He died on December 10, 2004 in Carmichael, California. (Strawser) Webb. The consensus, insofar as one exists, is that he probably overstated both the amount of drug money made by Ross and Blandón, and the percentage of those profits diverted to the Contras. "Gary Webb was left to fend for himself. -LATimes.com, According to the true story behind Kill the Messenger, Webb wrote the 1994 piece "The Forfeiture Racket" that exposed California's drug asset forfeiture laws, which enabled the police to seize homes and various other property of suspected drug dealers. -NYTimes.com, Yes. started since getting out of prison. Gary Webb goes on to explain how the isolation of the small Cabazon reservation, a tribe of thirty people, and its tax exempt status and lack of federal oversight were the advantages gained by using that location. Unable to get work from any major US newspaper, he spent the four months before his death writing for * a free-sheet covering the Sacramento area. Coral Baca's boyfriend was one of those dealers, a Nicaraguan by the name of Rafael Cornejo. Webb took a modestly paid, low-profile job as an investigator with the California State Legislature. Gary Webb Obituary. "Exactly," replied Kornbluh, who - referring specifically to the LA Times, said he is "baffled as to how they could be so gullible. But the report was correct. Starring Jeremy Renner, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michael Sheen, Copyright © 2021 HistoryvsHollywood.com, CTF Media. Gary was a man who loved his family with his whole heart and was intensely passionate about being Pa. "The first story he had to file was about a police horse which had died of constipation. He kept saying that he would never get another job in journalism.". ", Webb had already been cremated and his ashes scattered in the bay off Santa Cruz two weeks before. Gary Webb became, quite unfairly, the victim of one of the most extraordinary examples of piling on by the mainstream press, ever.". Despite being largely thrown under the bus by media outlets, including the newspaper that had employed him (the San Jose Mercury News), the Kill the Messenger true story reveals that a few journalists did come to his defense. In an unprecedented move, the then CIA director John Deutch was dispatched to address community leaders in the Watts district of LA. But his central thesis - that the CIA, having participated in narcotics trafficking in central America, had, at best, turned a blind eye to the activities of drug dealers in LA - has never been in question. To pay off his mounting debts, Webb sold the Carmichael property, where he was living alone, and arranged to move in with his mother. Look, he's killing himself. The story had little immediate impact. the business side of his former drug He was taken to hospital by air ambulance. Here is Gary Webb’s obituary. And when he got something in his head, he was determined to do it. Ten years later in 1998, Frederick P. Hitz, the CIA inspector general, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that following a thorough review of the matter, he believed that the CIA in the least acted as a bystander with regard to the war on drugs. So, he's sweating. He also discusses his Shortly before his death, his motorcycle had been stolen (it was recovered by his family after his death). Birthplace: Corona, CA Location of death: Carmichael, CA Cause of death: Suicide. He was never again hired by a daily newspaper. "I think the behaviour of the media in all of this has been amazing," says Bell. "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. The coroner ruled Webb's death a suicide, the result of two self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head. Webb, unlike Blum or Kerry, had to face his difficulties alone. A perceptive, engaging woman of 48, she has turned an adjoining study into a small shrine to her late husband, who would have celebrated his 50th birthday five weeks ago. This included his own newspaper, the That old dictum ought to hang on the walls of every journalism school in America. When his body was found, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was on the DVD machine, and his favourite CD, Ian Hunter's live album Welcome to the Club, was in the CD player. I first heard about Webb eight years ago, I tell Bell, from the Paris-based journalist Paul Moreira. Webb's corpse was found in the bedroom, with two gunshot wounds to the head. And this is not a happy story - or," she adds, "a little one.". We pride ourselves on the professional and … Gary Webb. "You sound very scared," Moreira remarks. I mean - please.". "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". movie trailer for the movie that tells the But such is the elusive nature […] He also had this inherent belief that the truth could not harm him. He had also lost his house the week before his suicide. Born in Corona, California, son of a conservatively minded Marine, he met Bell, whose father was a university lecturer, at high school in Indianapolis. 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. Like in the movie, the real Gary Webb attempted to uncover the connection between L.A.'s biggest crack dealer, "Freeway" Ricky Ross, and two narcotics suppliers and Nicaraguan Contra sympathizers, Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon. For two years, Blum and Kerry supervised the interrogation of dozens of witnesses who described CIA-related drug deals in central America. Her husband began his career on The Kentucky Post, and rapidly proved himself to be the sort of character who can be a secretive agency's worst nightmare: a full-blooded provocateur who liked to put the hours in at the library. Then, on 10 December, he resigned. Webb's reports prompted three official investigations, including one by the CIA itself which - astonishingly for an organisation rarely praised for its transparency - confirmed the substance of his findings (published at length in Webb's 1998 book, also entitled Dark Alliance).